A New Dawn
by Aquamarine Stag
Summary: Two years ago, Light Yagami awoke in Midgar. Now, questioning if he is living in a dream or if he simply awakened from one, Light finds a message that changes his world again. LighxL YazooxLoz Maybe YazooxLight. New Chapters! Please Review!
1. Chapter 1

A toxic gray light diffused through the morning sky when Light Yagami awoke. Thick oilsmoke of machines seeped up from the underground factories through the steaming sewer manholes and the ashen-mouthed iron chimneys where the bums huddled as the nights became colder. A chemical residue glistened on the streets; flashes of bursting particles, the uncombusted waste of an inefficient fusion core, crackled and shimmered in the air. Lower on the streets, shapes moved through the industrial fugue; a man with a pushcart followed by a crowd of school-aged children; the crook-limbed figure of a pan-handler; cars, puffing inefficiently through the poor air on oxygen starved engines. In the north, the nuclear rainbow of a mako blast arched across the sky. He touched the cool glass.

"Good morning, Midgar," he said.

Light worked at Shinra Headquarters, the building that dominated the Midgar skyline, pushing its enormous bulk out over gridblocks 0, 01, and 02 in sector 0, the very center of the city. He walked twenty-five blocks to the place where the dirty sidewalks converged at an empty fountain in the courtyard of the building's enormous lobby entrance. Once inside the lobby, Light flashed his card at a security guard and slipped up the back stairs.

Tennis was in the past. It was not played here. He exercised each morning by running up the seventy flights of stairs.

Light's office was on the 70th floor, overlooking the ruins of Midgar City. The population had abandoned the city after the One-Winged Angel had turned the sky and the stars themselves into a weapon; metero, summoned from the darkness, had devastated the city. They had built Edge City, a broken down ghetto, but a monument to their survival.

The people of Edge, and the Turks with them, had returned after the War of the Ghosts (as it was officially known or, as it was talked about among those who had witnessed it, the War of Children), had shattered the fragile stability of Edge City. The moved to the upper level of the palatial headquarters because they needed to be close to Rufus Shinra, the besieged president of the corporation. More importantly, Shinra could no longer afford its royalty. The company had been repeatedly humbled and at last, the lesson had sunk in. Shinra tightened its belt. They consolidated space; they sacrificed offices and break rooms, they turned the bottom floors of the building into shelters for Midgar's orphans and these were overflowing before they even began to comb the streets. They cut spending wherever they could; they went without paychecks and worked for living expenses alone.

The city was bankrupt, its infrastructure collapsing down to the innards.

At his desk, in an office overlooking the northern expanse of the city obscured by its soft, chemical twilight, Light pulled out the death note and began to work. At his computer terminal he pulled up a series of encrypted electronic messages, forwarded to him from random, specially encrypted rely points set up all over the city. All of the messages were from hardened criminals and they contained the names and photographs of individuals who had acted as their accomplices.

He began by going through what remained of Shinra's criminal databases and killing off the criminals who had been incarcerated before meteor, and escaped afterwards. This was a slow, but steady process. Nevertheless, after meteor, the city had lost almost all of its police force and Light knew that most of the criminals operating post-metero had never been arrested, or processed.

But the subtle genius of the death note was found in the way Light used it to manipulate the actions of those whose names he wrote. Each criminal he killed he instructed, via the death note, to send him the names and faces of all their accomplices. This allowed Light to keep current with the problem of crime in Midgar and to continue to kill criminals who had never been logged in Midagr's systems, or who had begun their activity only after every semblance of law and order was officially defunct.

Nevertheless, without any type of law enforcement or peace-keeping force, it was an uphill battle. Kira had at last found a force as ubiquitous and determined as he was: its name was Lawlessness.

"Light?" Tseng stood in the doorway of his office. "Light, are you coming? To the meeting?" He spoke in Wu-Taian, a language which had only one or two critical differences from Japanese; it was something he and Light had in common. Light blinked and looked at the clock.

"I'm sorry," he said. "The time slipped away from me. I'll be right in." Tseng nodded and shut the door. Light closed the Death Note and tucked it in his jacket. Presently he became aware of the soft, sickly flapping of two scabbed wings.

"When can we go back?" Ryuk whined, his grim-face frozen in its feelingless grin.

"I'm not completely sure how shinigami brains process information," Light said, "but I can say with some certainty that yours is only marginally successful. I told you, I don't know when we can go back. I don't know when we can go back because I don't know how we came here."

"I thought you said it was because you were needed here, and cosmic forces always organize the universe so each element can exert its influence where it is most needed? See? I remembered."

"I also said that was one possible explanation, but that it sounds too much like an episode of Quantum Leap to be true."

"Oh, right. I forgot that part."

"I have a meeting so I'm going to ignore you now." Light walked out into the hall and down three doors to a tiny conference room, utilizing a desk rather than a conference table, around which the Turks had gathered.

"I apologize for being late," he said. Reno Sinclair said,

"You missed my motion. I moved, before you walked your late-ass in the door, that since we all smoke we lift the ban on smoking in government offices. Can I get a second?"

"Second," Tseng said, then: "All in favor?" All the Turks, Light included, raised their hands.

Cigarettes were lit around the desk. The meeting began.

"First order of business," Tseng said. "We need to talk about Kira."


	2. Chapter 2

Disclaimer: I own nothing. Death Note and Final Fantasy are property of their respective owners.

Reno rolled his eyes to the ceiling.

"Yo, boss, I don't know if this is going to go on record as insubordination, but f* it, we know as much now as we knew when this sh* started, yo, and that's exactly squat," he said, cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth. "Two years, and we got nothing new. I mean, criminals are scared sh*less. That's new. I got guys down on plate 6 trafficking in kiddy porn saying _rosarios_ every night like its going out of style, but I'm not losing sleep over it." Reno puffed on his cigarette. "We got worse problems. I move we table Kira and start working on how the h*ll we're going to dig ourselves out of our quintillion (I ain't making that figure up, yo) dollars in debt so we can put some money back into the city."

Light waited a moment and if Rude hadn't done so, he would have politely seconded the motion. As it was, Rude raised his enormous hand.

"We have other problems," Rude said. "Sector 7 is showing an instability in the fusion core of one of the mako reactors."

"S*t," Reno kicked back, crossing his boots on the table. "The f*k? What's happening?"

"The systems show static charges building," Rude said. "Unless we radiate, that sh*s going to blow up real good."

"We need engineers to radiate. How many engineers do we have left?" Tseng asked. Parliamentary procedure was largely ignored at Shinra's meetings nowadays.

"Seventy-five," Light said. "Including new trainees. Sixty on active payroll, spread out over seven sectors."

"That's less than ten per sector," Tseng rubbed his forehead, looking at a data printout that Rude had handed him, showing the looming mako disaster building on the plate beneath them where the critical mass was building. "How many engineers can we send down?"

"We might be able to skim one or two engineers from Reactor 4," Light said. "Reactor 4 is functioning with the highest degree of efficiency."

"What about Reactor 0, right under this building?" Tseng asked. "What about us? Can we take this hit?"

"We don't have any engineers here right now," Light said. "Reactor 0 that powers this building and the others in this sector is running on automated sequences."

"And we can't automate Reactor 4?" Tseng asked

"We can," Light said, "provided you want to risk a static charge."

"Yeah, most of the engineers we got working full time just to try and keep the static charges down. They're only getting 4-5 hours of sleep as it is," Reno said.

"The mako we use in the reactors, refined mako, gradually destabilizes over time," Light said. "As it gets more unstable, the risk of static charge increases. A static charge happens when a mako atom becomes so unstable it discharges electrons, starting a chain reaction among adjacent mako atoms and resulting ultimately in a Grand Mal Explosion."

"Static charges are eliminated by radiating the mako," Reno said. "An engineer—when you got one—uses a sunlamp to expose the mako to stabilizing radition. You think we can spare some engineers from our reactor?"

"We don't really have a choice," Rude said.

"I concur," Light said. "Besides, 0 is the most stable of the all the reactors."

"Skim as many engineers as you can from Reactor 0," Tseng said. "If necessary, we'll activate a few more engineers."

"And what are we going to pay them with, sexual favors yo?" Reno asked. "Shit, nobody works for blow jobs anymore. Those days are gone. We gonna start selling blood?" It was at this point Tseng looked at Light, who had distinguished himself by memorizing the budget and who could slash and trim it in his head, reappropriating funds as emergencies required.

And there was always a new emergency.

Light considered a moment. Then, "If we eliminate .04 percent from the transportation budget, that should cover three more engineers, which is enough to take care of the pipe situation, yes?" Rude nodded and shrugged at the same time.

"It would be better with eighteen, which is how many are supposed to run each plant," Rude said. "There will be a risk of explosion. But what else is new?"

"That should be our motto, yo," Reno said. "Shinra: There will be some risk of explosion."

"What's .04 percent of transportation?" Tseng asked. "What will that come to per engineer?"

"28,655 gil," Light said. "Give or take ½ percent."

"Slave wages for a skilled laborer," Tseng muttered.

"They'll be happy just to have a job, yo," Reno said. "Its more than most people have."

"All right," Tseng said. "Do it. Next order of business?"

"I got one," Reno said. "We need to restaff at least two of the hospitals on three. Emergency lifts up to two have stopped working, yo." He squinted at Light. "You got some budget you haven't cut yet, so we can get some money to pay some doctors, yo?" Light rubbed his eyes.

"Have you considered selling blood?" he asked.

The meeting progressed in much this way until well after dark.


	3. Chapter 3

**Disclaimer: I own nothing. Death Note and Final Fantasy are property of their respective owners.**

**A/N: If you like it, rate it and review it. If you don't, do it anyway.**

Light sat on the ledge that surrounded the 70th floor. Reno had showed him how carefully climbing out the windows yielded a small perch with an incredible view, and a sense of peace found nowhere else in the city. He smoked quietly, a bottle of fruit juice open beside him.

"I hope you got booze up in that sh*t, yo," Reno said as he slipped out of the window of his office, standing on the chemical slick ledge beside Light. Long-legged, foxfire hair softly windblown at the heights of Shinra tower, Reno dropped down beside him. Rude followed a moment later, an enormous man whose silence was as much a tactic of intimidation as it was a prudent response to Shinra politics.

"No," Light said. "I've never really drunk much."

"You're in Midgar now," Reno asked. "You don't drink, you cry." He unscrewed the cap of a bottle and poured something clear and sharp-smelling into Light's open juice bottle. "Its medicine for the soul."

"Thanks," Light said absently. He checked his watch. In the distance, an alarm sounded. Moments later, a mako blast boomed out over the city: a glowing, newgreen, starfire blast of liquidous light traveling through the atmosphere like a current of celestial water, or tendrils of the fearful night. "It's so beautiful. I never stop thinking it's beautiful. I never saw anything like that at home."

"Figured out where home is yet, yo?" Reno asked.

"In relation to Midgar, no," Light said. "I still have nothing. I've poured over every map, and I have nothing. I can't find Japan anywhere." The mako blast dissipated into the chemical fog hanging low in the sky.

"It's okay, mystery baby," Reno said. "We all got secrets."

"I'm not deliberately keeping it a secret," Light insisted. "Japan. I'm from Japan."

"No such place," Reno said. "Not on any of my maps, yo."

"I don't understand this," Light said. "I've been trying to figure this out for two years. I left everything behind. People that were very important to me. My father—"

_(flash of dark hair. white hands, coolwhite, deadwhite brushing his cheek. not even sleep has eyes that dark)_

"—mother , my sister. I can't imagine what they're going through. I was very close to my family."

"You know what I think, yo," Reno said.

"Dissociative fugue," Light said. Reno had offered this explanation twice before. It was uncomfortable for Light, because it made the most sense of any explanation he had offered himself for why we had awakened one morning, in a strange apartment, in a strange bed, with memories of a childhood and youth lived in a place that did not exist.

"Yo, it's a common phenomena," Reno said. "Guy undergoes some serious trauma and he just builds a new life for himself. Case in point, a guy came home and found that his wife's ex-boyfriend had come over, killed her, and killed their newborn baby. He walks out of the house, wanders down the street, rents a hotel room under a different name, and from that moment on he insists that he's lived his whole life as a single man. Gave himself a whole new identity, totally without any conscious desire to do so. No, no, its just his brain couldn't take it. It had to defend itself from that much pain, yo, so it created spontaneously this whole other life for him."

"I know, I know," Light said. "It's the most (_darkflash of hair)_ plausible explanation for _(tightpresskiss)_ my situation. And logically, intellectually, I think that is the case. I went through some trauma _(tellmeyourname tellmeyourname tellmeyourname)_ that my mind couldn't handle and my brain, defending itself _(iloveyou iloveyou)_ created a new life for me, and locked my old life—the source of _(Kira Kira Kira)_ trauma—away where I couldn't be hurt by it. Some of it just seems too (_L, L, L, L)_ real to be fabricated."

"The brain is a mighty fortress, and we are but its inhabitant for a short time, yo," Reno said. "That's a quote from Wallesby. Great playwright." Light said,

"I don't remember him. He didn't exist in Japan."


	4. Chapter 4

**Disclaimer: I own nothing. Death Note and Final Fantasy are property of their respective owners.**

**A/N: If you like it, rate it and review it. If you don't, do it anyway.**

Light flopped down on his bed, bone-weary. His feet and fingertips tingled with exhaustion. He fell asleep immediately, in his clothes, and lay dreamlessly on his bed for an hour until he snapped awake, aware that he'd passed out and experiencing a moment of terror that his brain would spasm again, producing another phantom from out of its injured core.

He looked up at the shinigami.

"Would you tell me if I dreamed that other life? Or if I am dreaming this one?" he asked, for the hundredth time.

"Of course not, Light," Ryuk said. "I find this all very interesting."

"You remember the other life though," Light said.

"Yes."

"The question then is 'how do I know I'm not hallucinating you?'"

"That is the question," Ryuk laughed, pinwheeling in the air. "You're funny, Light."

"I can't think about it," Light got up from the bed. "I have to finish some work." He reached into his pocket, touched the death note.

A normal day in Midgar was statistically likely to produce the following results.

150 people would be murdered.

150 million dollars (mostly in food and clothing) would be stolen.

1800 women would prostitute themselves for the first time.

60 children would be lost or kidnapped.

45 of them would be sold into a white slave trade.

Light's mind bulleted each point. His psychic dams overflowed. In a moment, the splendor of human suffering uttered its cry. He felt the pressure of Midgar's lawlessness on his back and in his bones. Ryuk laughed, pinwheeling in the air. He stopped after a minute.

"Light, this apartment stinks," he said. "Let's get a new one. Something better than this."

"I'm a civil servant," Light said. "We need to live with very little right now. There's no money for 'better than this.'"

He sat at his computer. He logged into the internet. He started up a few programs of his own design to ensure that he was not being monitored and that he was alone (alone in a dark room of hyperspace he had created using his own program, a program called the 'black box') he began downloading more names.

He worked until midnight, smoking like a detective from a noire film until he ran out of cigarettes and he began to jones for nicotine. It was dangerous to go out in Midgar after dark. Nicotine addiction won out over personal safety. Arming himself with a ring of fire materia he went out into the street, shoes scraping on the grimy pavement, towards the flickering light of a convenience store run by a chain-smoking seeq who wore stained ribbed tank tops and drank malt liquor straight from the bottle. The seeq sat behind bullet proof glass with a grate of safety bars over it.

"Hey Light," he pulled out a pack of Oriental Blacks. "Need any matches?"

"Good gods, yes," Light mumbled, pulling out his Shinra ID. "Tax free," he said. The seeq pushed the cigarettes at him.

"On the house," he said.

"I pay like everyone else," Light handed him a 10 gil, a fraction of the 18 gil he would have paid with taxes added on. He took the cigarettes and started in the direction of his tiny apartment.

Our lives change for many reasons, because of many events. Some of them are very big and mysterious. The sudden shift of gravity that sent a mind as apt and keen as Light Yagami's hurtling through time and space was one of those into the world of Gaia was one of those. Others are very small, though the changes they portend can be much greater.

Light Yagami had almost reached his apartment door when a dump truck cut across the pedestrian cross-walk. He had to jump on the curb and the truck driver, shouting an obscenity at him, swerved on the road, dumping two trash bags into the street. Light grabbed them, pulling them into an alley dumpster. One went in without a problem, the other broke open, spilling its contents onto the floor. The sulfuric smell was noxious. Light held his sleeve over his nose and mouth, kicking a few pieces of scrap metal towards the dumpster when something, little scratches from little claws, caught his eye.

He bent down and picked up the exploded cylinder of a practice grenade, the kind used to train S.O.L.D.I.E.R.s, back when Shinra had an active military.

This was strange, since the S.O.L.D.I.E.R. program had been defunct for years. Practice grenades were no longer manufactured. No one used them.

Light picked up the curved shard, walked underneath the pooling light of a streetlamp. A thin coat of black mako, the kind used to load practice grenades, coated the inside of the metal. The shards were fresh and un-rusted. The grenade had recently been set off.

Scratched on the inside, in little white lines in the soft metal of the grenade shell, were words. Light held his breath. His mind, his world, froze.

help us kira. they sent us back. ferrimas gast.

y k l


	5. Chapter 5

**Disclaimer: I own nothing. Death Note and Final Fantasy are the property of their respective owners.**

**A/N: If you like it, rec it. Please Read and Review.**

**A/N2: As the word cross-over implies, this is a cross-over. I have taken the following liberties. 1) The lands of FF4, 6, 7, 10, and 12 all coexist on the same planet. So does Amestris, the land of Fullmetal Alchemist. Characters from most of these fandoms will play a role in this fic. No, I am not ashamed of myself. I'm a hag and I don't care.**

Light had spent as much spare time as he had researching the history of Midgar. He knew about Sephiroth, about Nibleheim, and about the heroisms of Cloud Strife, Avalanche, and about the crimes of the Shinra doctors—among whom was numbered Ferrimas Ghast.

He knew about the War of the Children, and its cause. Like all the horrors that had plagued Midgar, it was connected to Jenova. Nevertheless, there was something excessively tragic in it.

He had watched tapes of Sephiroth's training. He was cold, arrogant, majestic, and powerful. He was godlike and severe when he fought, pitiless and indifferent when he killed. He was a force of nature; his summoning of Meteor was an earth-shattering event, his hatred a profound and infinite surge against which Light, even years from moment, felt himself helpless. Yet when Sephiroth withdrew from Midgar, it was with the sense that all was over. The pressure building had been released. The eruption was over. The violence had come and gone and with his anger satisfied, calm returned.

The War of the Children was, in Light's mind, more stinging. The aggressors had been children themselves. Three silver-haired beings had torn through the city with the scratching, biting rage that comes from pain, their polished eyes sharp and searching for veins, calling down monsters and chimeras on the city, extinguishing themselves in a furious, futile rebellion against the typhonic majesty of Shinra. Brought down in the space of two days, their short, violent lives remained mysterious. Little was known about where they had come from. Little was known about them, except for their names.

Yazoo, Kadaj, and Loz.

Y. K. L.

Light's mind unfolded. His genius was a religion to him: this information transfigured him. When the death note had fallen into the courtyard of his school, a similar transfiguration of the complex system of information had occurred. New considerations were introduced. New variables shifted the parameters of the mathematics.

He brought the shard home and laid it on his desk, examining it carefully underneath the weak desk lamp. Ryuk hung in the air behind him, like a vulture waiting for some poor creature to expire.

"What is that?" he asked.

"A piece of an exploded flash-bang grenade," Light said. "It's used during training sessions of S.O.L.D.I.E.R. cadets. They are loaded with various kinds of materia and set off as obstacles." Light scraped a tiny portion of the sickly blackish slime off the inside of the canister. "It's poison materia."

"So what?"

Light leaned back in his chair, considering.

"All the data is here if you know how to interpret it," Light said. He hit a few keys on his terminal and logged into his shinra account. He navigated through the Shinra intranet to the waste disposal terminal and read over the most recent logs. "Trash bags fell out of the truck. This means they were on the top of the pile, picked up last. If they were picked up last, it means they were dropped off at one of two dump stations. Public station 039 or government station 096."

"Oh."

"Flash-bang grenades were used in the defunct S.O.L.D.I.E. program. They were purely government issue. Now, flash-bangs are useless for all but training purposes. Let me explain:

"Materia is a complex system of storing information. Materia stores different formulas for material effects. Fire material has stored within it the formula for producing fire, but this formula exists in an inert, purely mathematical way. Different kinds of material store different formulas: fire, sickness—sorry, "bio"—and any kind of effect you can imagine. The ancients called these formulas 'memories.' Like all modules of information, materia requires a charge to release its information in the form of an effect.

"The charge it requires is electrical. This is why human beings can use it just by wanting to use it; the brain is an electrical machine and when it wants to use materia, it fires off a signal. The materia is highly sensitive to all the electrical pulses that happen in a human being's mental field and it intercepts that charge and it fires off its effect. The mind provides the charge; the materia produces its effect. There you go.

"In a flash-bang grenade, the charge that ignites the materia is only a level 1 or 2 charge provided by a low voltage battery—nothing like the level 99 charge that a seasoned human mind can deliver into the materia. That makes it an especially weak effect, suitable only for training purposes.

"Now," Light said, "there is a lot of illegal weapons trafficking going on among civilians in Midgar. However, given the fact that a flash-bang is useful only as a distraction, it's unlikely that anyone in Midgar is bothering to trade for them. This, of course, tells us that this grenade is being used at a government facility."

"Oh," Ryuk scratched his head with a claw.

"Now, the S.O.L.D.I.E.R. program is defunct, yes?"

"Yuh."

"So who would be setting of a flash-bang grenade? I mean, if we are not training any soldiers anymore, who is using a S.O.L.D.I.E.R. training device?"

"I dunno."

"Me either. So something in our data must be incorrect." He clicked a few keys on the screen. "Do you know who the Shinra Four are?"

"I can honestly say that I don't."

"I took the liberty of doing some independent research into the databases of Vayne Solidor over in Archades which, thankfully, are guarded with little enthusiasm and even less expertise. He has an extensive report on the Shinra Four—its mostly conjecture and a lot of wrong information, but the mood of overwhelming revulsion for the 'Doctors of Death' is…revealing."

"The Doctors of Death?"

"The Doctors of Death is what Vayne Solidor named the Shinra Four when he found out about the Jenova experiments conducted on wounded soldiers by Dr. Hojo. The name has caught on. Fuhrer-President King Bradley in Amestria drummed up some popularity for a pointless excursion into what used to be some outlying regions of Shinra territory near the Nam-Yensa by reminding his people that Rufus Shinra had written a blank check to the 'Doctors of Death' and 'should be opposed, tooth and claw.' Same with King Galuf Baldesion of Bal. He justified signing an Anti-Invasion protection pact with Solidor by citing the 'lawless and reckless behavior of the Shinra corporation and its thuggish henchmen, the Doctors of Death."

"Jeez," Ryuk said. "You sure you want to work for these Shinra people? I think they might be the bad guys."

"Very observant," Light said. "And anyway, I'm not working for them. Midgar is the largest city in the world, and I am working for it and its tired, poor, wretched, you get the idea."

"Right, I forgot."

"Back to the point. The Shinra Four. Doctors of Death. Dr. Hojo, Dr. Faremis Gast, Dr. Hollander Hewley, and Dr. Lucrezia Crescent. All of them brilliant: all of them unscrupulous, and brutally indifferent o human suffering. This is the breakdown of their activities:

"In 5577, Dr. Faremis Gast discovers what he takes to be an ancient encased in mako. This ancient is actually Jenova, an alien parasite, the 'calamity from the skies.' Dr. Hojo correctly identifies Jenova and in 5578 submits a proposal to Shinra to begin using Jenova to create super-soldiers, one super-soldier specifically. This all happens in secret. President Maximillian Shinra gives him unlimited funds to begin creating this super-soldier.

"In 5579, Dr. Lucrecia Crescent and Dr. Hojo (full name unknown) are working on the Super-Soldier program full time. That same year, Dr. Lucrezia Crescent officially withdraws from the Jenova project. In 5580, she donates her infant son for experimentation at the request of Dr. Hojo, her then common-law husband."

"Wouldn't spring for a ring, huh?"

"In 5579, Dr. Hollander Hewley is working on a simultaneous project, hiw own version of Dr. Hojo's experiments. This is Project Gillian, a hideous project in which he injects pregnant women with Jenova cells. Of the ten pregnant women, eight died. Two survived and bore children named Genesis Rhapsodos and Angeal Hewley. A short time later he goes underground.

"In 5608 M.E., the Jenova project is officially called to a close when the soldier it produced, General Sephiroth Crescent, goes awol. In 5609 Dr. Hojo begins a series of unofficial experiments on injured soldiers, who are reported dead. By all accounts, these are grisly experiments that cause intense suffering on fully conscious and functional young men."

"Ouch."

"In 5612, this second super-soldier project collapses with the escape of Zachariah Fair and Cloud Strife. Dr. Hojo escapes to Costa del Sol. Dr. Hollander Hewley takes it upon himself to go after the survivors of Hojo's experiments. He corners Cloud Strife and Zack Fair and, in an attempt to gain control of Cloud, whom he deems the most successful of Hojo's experiments, he orders his soldiers to murder Zack Fair."

"Cripes."

"Cripes indeed," Light said. "It only gets worse. In 5613—that's last year, mind you—a group of soldier's called the Tsviets wage an unsuccessful rebellion against Shinra, alleging that they have been the victims of human experimentation conducted by Dr. Hojo who was still continuing his attempt to create super-soldiers in a _third_ super-soldier program, code-named Project Deepground. Weiss Kaiseros—sorry, Weiss 'The Immaculate'—is able to provide proof of his claim and, once again, Dr. Hojo escapes."

"I'm sensing a pattern."

"Are you sensing a pattern? I'm surprised. At any rate, jus in case the pattern you sense is something stupid or irrelevant, I'll lay it out for you. This is the pattern:

1. The Shinra Doctors of Death end their project officially; 2) they then go underground and carry them out, in secret, without any checks and with a total disregard for human life." He paused, thoughtfully, then, "The last of these Doctors of Death was one Faremis Gast."

"Oh." A long pause, then, "Hey, that's the name written in your blasty-thingy!"

"Bravo," Light said dryly. He turned back to his terminal screen, scrolling through Shinra databases with fresh enthusiasm. "Why should Faremis Gast be an exception to the rule? I mean, all the other doctors went underground and continued their projects in secret. What if Dr. Gast did the same thing? Faremis Gast was supposedly killed at Icicle Lodge by Dr. Hojo, but Dr. Hojo has been 'killed' more times than you can count on one hand—all of them faked. Why should Gast be any different? Why wouldn't Dr. Gast fake his own death? And why wouldn't Gast, like the others, continue his research with total impunity in some secret location?"

"So you think…"

"Eventually, each one of the Doctors of Death who supposedly 'died' turned up with a new Jenova filled monster, some tortured half-human, begotten in pain and secrecy, who unleashed its terror on the world in a furious hatred of its creators: Sephiroth, Genesis, Weiss, Deepground, all of them can be described in that way. But so can the Shinentai!"

"The who?"

"Please try and pay attention. The Shinentai, Yazoo, Kadaj, and Loz, the three Silver-Haired Children who attacked the city last year." He laid a hand on his forehead. "Oh, how could no one have seen this before? It's so obvious! Tseng has always said their origin was a mystery. But isn't it clear that they are just like the others, and that such similarity suggests that they too, are experiments?"

"Ye-es."

"And whose experiments could they be?" Light's eyes were golden with enthusiasm as the information, overlapping in delicate ellipses of datums, began to take shape in his mind. He turned to Ryuk, with his beautiful, shinning eyes, full of earnestness and determination. "Anyone's really. But why not the last one, Dr. Faremis Gast, the only one who's never unleashed his horrors on the world—only perhaps he did."

"But even if the three what's-it's-calleds were experiments, they might be Hojo's or Hollander's, mightn't they?"

"My blasty-thingy says otherwise," Light said, pointing to the words scratched within. "Faremis Gast. If this is a cry for help from Loz, Kadaj, and Yazoo—from Y.K.L—then they may be as much victims of the Shinra Doctors of Death as Sephiroth, Angeal, Genesis, and Weiss were. It stands to reason that the name they, in desperation, have given Kira is the name of their tormentor."

"Oh yeah. Forgot about that thing."

"You have the brain cell count of a walnut," Light said cordially. He began downloading data from the Shinra computers. "I'm going to research as much as I can on Faremis Gast and the Doctors of Death. And doesn't it make perfect sense that a Shinra doctor, operating in secrecy, would be using the leftovers of Shinra technology, like flash-bangs?"

"I guess so. Why not just kill him with the Death Note?"

"The name scratched into the cylinder shell piece is Ferramis, not Faremis. If there is a risk of misspelling the name, I'd rather not attempt it until I am certain. But I have to find out if the three clones might not be still in captivity. The message says: 'they sent us back.' Can you imagine how horrible that would be, if they escaped from some facility where they were being tortured and experimented on, only to be returned there? I need to discover the nature of this message." He turned off his screen as the download continued. "I'm going to get some sleep. Tomorrow I have a lot of work to do. In the morning, I'm networking the terminals on three different plates and in the afternoon, Kira is going to lay the foundation for a minor uprising that will hopefully result in the organizing of a provisional militia police force. Then, I will have to find out why and how this message came to me. No one shall ever appeal to Kira in vain."

Light lay in bed with a calm, serene expression, the ardour of the just at last finding rest in the calm waters of sleep.


	6. Chapter 6

**Disclaimer: I own nothing. Death Note and Final Fantasy VII are property of their respective owners.**

**A/N: In this fic, Kadaj, Loz and Yazoo are clones as well as emanations of Sephiroth. I find this explanation more plausible and I'm going with it.**

Dr. Hojo flicked a piece of dust off his white lab coat, appraising the labs of his friend and scientific rival, Dr. Faremis Gast, with the cruel satisfaction of a wealthy child visiting a shabby, destitute orphanage. The locks were glitching. Delightful. Faremis was inside with his assistants, trying to rapidly restore the circuitry that would allow the esteemed Dr. Hojo into the building. Utterly delightful.

Snap. Snap. Pop snap.

The circuits announced failure for the fourth time. Up in the glassed-in observation point, from which a few guards monitored the entrance, Dr. Hojo could just make out Faremis Gast, smiling and chatting with the indifferent guards, making a great effort to appear effortless as he tried in vain to open up the gate.

Purely, utterly delightful.

Finally, and with a terrible grind, the automated doors opened. Dr. Hojo strolled in, flicking back his dark hair. Faremis came hurrying down the stairs, red-faced, smiling.

"Dr. Hojo," he said, extending his hand. "It's been a long time. I'm so glad you've come to visit my lab. What have you been up to these days?"

"Participating in a vigorous boycott on banal introductions," Dr. Hojo said. "I haven't come here to play. I've had three super-soldier projects collapse, Faremis. Hewley is dead and I've been ousted from all my labs. You're the last one left. Let's see some progress, Faremis, I've no interest in catching up on our University days—although as I recall, I hazed the hell out of you." He smiled in his most deliberately needling, unpleasant fashion.

"Progress I have," Faremis said. He drew himself up, a minor declaration of authority which Hojo chose to ignore. "The research here has gone farther than in its past incarnations—farther, even, than you got with Sephiroth, I think. I've refined the process of splicing Jenova cells into its most duplicable and successful formulation."

"My, that is progress," Dr. Hojo said. "But tell me, what do you mean by successful?" They passed a few empty holding cells. Steel frames were suspended empty; the glass had been broken out, and crunched underneath their shoes. Faremis laughed,

"Don't tell me your going to quibble on semantics, my friend."

"Friends we are, aren't we Faremis?" Hojo oozed. "Friends we are." He stopped before a steel wall where a control panel had been ripped out. Gutted wires spilled onto the floor. Large gashes had been clawed into the wall, dragged along, popping wires and switchboards all throughout the steel casing. The wall had at one time been capable of becoming electrified, to prevent its inmates from escaping. Someone had removed that capability in a fit of destructive power. "Seems to me success has different measures, though." He cleared his throat. "For example, Sephiroth could kick the crap out of anything you have ever churned out of this clone-mill. That, to me, is success. On the other hand," he pushed his glasses up his nose and grinned at Faremis, "this place looks like it has quite recently been the site of a very rare T-Rexaur stampede…so what happened here, Faremis?" Faremis cheeks had gone red. He said, with the utmost dignity,

"We had a recent security compromise. 041 has displayed capabilities exceeding my expectations and the security systems were unable to adapt in time. We've fixed the problem, though."

"I take it 042 did these?" Hojo pointed to the gashed in the wall.

"He did," Faremis answered. "With a pile bunker."

"Sounds like success to me," Hojo said, suppressing a sneer just enough to imply its existence. "And, of course, we must measure success in our creation's ability to run around Edge city like hobgoblins, wreaking havoc on the women and children therein." Faremis said softly,

"If that were the case, you would still be far more successful than I." Hojo frowned.

"Sephiroth was hardly a shrieking hobgoblin," Hojo said. "And summoning meteor was hardly on par with your little hellions—look, nevermind, it isn't important." Hojo suddenly seemed to tire of jabbing and Faremis, who had prepared all morning for a long, drawn out session of cruel backbiting, found himself suddenly floundering and unprepared. "Let's see them. I've only seen the footage on the news, and I want to see them."

"Right this way," Faremis motioned down a gutted hallway, its tangle of mutilated wiring and hardware spilling out onto the floor, testifying to the great violence of the shinentai's escape.


	7. Chapter 7

**Disclaimer: I won nothing Final Fantasy and Death Note are property of their respective owners.**

**A/N: Enter Kadaj**

In a glass-walled room, wrapped in the torn canvas wings of a straight jacket 041, little-boned and eerily beautiful, huddled in the middle of the floor. An attempt had been made to cut his hair. Some of it was missing, the rest was thin and unwashed and hanging before his eyes in silver knife-points. His fingers moved rapidly along the floor in lines and loops: ones and zeroes forming invisible lines of binary in sweat and dust on the cool steel floor.

This was Kadaj.

Dr. Hojo peered into the room, not at all bothering to feign analytic curiosity, because he was truly fascinated with these Jenova creations.

"He's schizophrenic, isn't he?" Hojo asked. Faremis didn't answer. He didn't have to. "The plans you showed me indicated that the schizophrenia would be controlled." Hojo's reflection hovered over Kadaj, semi-transparent in the glass.

"It is controlled," Faremis said. "Kadaj is quite responsive to MAOI inhibitors and, when functioning at optimal, he registers in the upper left-hand quadrant of the Shumacher-Esterhouse differential."

And Faremis was fully prepared to defend his claim. He was prepared to explain Kadaj's behavior, even to concede the temporary if jarring lapse in his creations mental health. He had all his evidence organized and memorized. He was convinced Dr. Hojo could do nothing to undermine his claim that Kadaj was, when properly medicated, a complete success. Instead, Dr. Hojo lowered his glasses, gazing at Faremis over the steel rims. He said,

"Kadaj? I'm sorry; I thought I was looking at 041. Are you telling me you _named it?_" Faremis' stomach fell away. He saw his mistake too late. He answered,

"I am using a method of control that requires familiarity," a stutter tickled the back of his throat, like a cough waiting to happen. He tried to swallow it back. "I felt that the conditioning was not as effective."

"Conditioning was not effective."

"No."

"Faremis, I designed a program wherein certain commands were subliminally embedded in the subconscious thought-matrix of each clone. All you have to do is say the trigger-word and the clone will perform the command chemically and subliminally linked to that trigger word. That worked brilliantly, for Hewley and myself, but you're saying it just flat out stinks, are you?"

"I'm saying it didn't work for them," Faremis said. "I embedded the subliminal controls in them, certainly, trigger phrases and everything. But Kadaj was brilliant. He could reprogram himself. So I had to do something to control them. I chose to—to make them care for me, and thus to preempt all rebellion. Making them care for me required familiarity. It required names."

"I see," Dr. Hojo said. "Without reviving the age-old debate about whether or not it is better to be loved or feared, Faremis, am I to understand that you threw all our carefully crafted control mechanisms out the window in favor of coddling them?"

"I do not coddle them," Faremis said.

"These are super-weapons designed to take out Sephiroth, not pets, Faremis."

"And I don't treat them as pets," Faremis said. "But the control mechanisms in place were ineffective. I programmed subliminal controls into Kadaj, just as was planned. They worked the first few times, but he has shown an amazing ability to reprogram himself."

"I see."

"However, both Kadaj and Loz—that is the name I gave 042—showed intense emotional centers, and I chose to exploit that in order to control them."

"By…?"

"By making them enter with me into a—a family dynamic."

Hojo slapped his forehead.

"Perfect."

"I exploited their most vulnerable feature, their lack of emotional control and intense propensity to form emotional ties and exhibit extreme loyalty—"

"Confound you, Faremis; didn't you see how miserably that failed between me and my son? Or between Hollander Hewley and his brat Angeal? A family dynamic? A family dynamic, really? Here's a tip from someone who's child didn't die from a masamune to the gut: kids grow up and then they rebel!" Faremis flinched at the mention of Aeris.

"You have not seen the kind of loyalty that they show to one another," Faremis began, but almost saw the futility of his protest.

"Yes, _one another._ But I don't see any evidence of that loyalty being shown to you, Faremis," Dr. Hojo went to the glass and looked in at Kadaj. His small, round face had upturned to look at them; one silvery-blue, mako eye peered through the sharp angles of his hair. His fingers darted and looped. His thin, whitish mouth formed words, but neither of the scientists were watching him.

"I had to exploit the opportunities that were available to me," Faremis voice wavered. Hojo said, slowly and deliberately,

"We created 041 and 042 to destroy Sephiroth in the even we lost control of him. How are 041 and 042 supposed to fight and kill Sephiroth, on our behalf, if we do not have implanted within them the mechanisms that allow us to effectively control them?"

"Soldiers don't fight, and kill, and die because some scientist puts subliminal controls into their subconscious—"

"These aren't soldiers, Faremis, they are better than soldiers. Soldiers fail, and our creations cannot fail _if they are properly controlled._"

"You didn't know how to do it," Faremis said. Then, without meaning to, regretting it horribly even before the words were out of his mouth, hanging irreparably in the air, "He didn't love you like a father." Dr. Hojo rubbed his forehead.

"I'm not going to dignify that with a response," Hojo said.


	8. Chapter 8

**Disclaimer: I won nothing Final Fantasy and Death Note are property of their respective owners.**

**A/N: Yes, I have changed the origin of the clones. Remember all those failed Sephiroth clones you met in FFVII? Well, it's a little like that. R&R, if you don't nightmares.**

"Where is 042?"

"This way," Faremis stepped briskly aside. Hojo lingered a moment before the glassed in cell, watching the devastated creature within. Kadaj looked up at him for a moment, green glass eyes peering, window upon window, through the clear barriers, a shattering moment. The little, wrecked thing crouched low towards the floor, continuing his desperate, idiot message, invisible to everyone but his own fragmented, ghostly mind.

They traveled down a long hallway to find 042, the second Sephiroth clone.

In a steel room, reinforced by explosive bulwarks, Faremis Gast had anchored an enormous blast box—a Shinra patent, a steel containment unit designed to resist megaton materia blasts. The chains that held the blast box in place were bolted into the walls with chains that creaked and swayed as the blast box rattled in the middle of the room.

Outside the steel room, looking trough plate glass windows at the vibrating blast box on its spindly chains, Faremis said,

"He's inside the box, as a precaution. He's agitated, that's the reason he's able to knock the box around. I'd say that even if he weren't, there'd be a good chance that he would do some serious damage if he had a mind. He doesn't like confinement." Hojo pushed his glasses up. With one thin finger, he hit the button on an intercom wirelessly linked into the blast box's internal monitoring ports.

A low, guttural growl issued warmly from the vent of the speaker, curling, frothing in the open air. Hojo withdrew his hand.

"The confinement period should be shortened as much as possible," Dr. Hojo said.

"The confinement," Faremis said, "is not the reason for 042's agitation."

"Regardless, if he doesn't like it, it can't be helping his state of mind, can it?" Hojo said. Then, "What do you say you call him?"

"Loz."

"Loz. And have you used his subliminals or has he also managed to subvert your carefully implanted controls?"

"Please," Faremis said. "Loz couldn't reprogram a VCR, much less himself. I have used them but, of course, they are only temporary. Eventually he wakes up."

"What about the serotonin release subliminals," Hojo said. "Why haven't you activated the inhibitors?"

"I have," Faremis said with a slight cough. "That's the reason the blast box is still…anchored down at all."

"That is a bit of good news," Hojo said. "At least he's strong. At least he _worked._"

"Kadaj worked as well—"

"Kadaj is a wreck, Faremis," Hojo said. "I designed Kadaj myself, and he was never supposed to be the mental wasteland he is now. The dopamine dumps were timed to coincide with the contracting of the cerebrospinal pumps and that should have alleviated any schizophrenic tendencies related to the excess of dopamine."

"Our brain scans of Kadaj have shown that the Jenova cells treated the pumps as invasive organisms and overwhelmed them," Faremis said. In the room below them, the box rumbled. The sound went tumbling down the clanging chains. Hojo glanced down at the blast box with interest, then back at Faremis.

"Why weren't any Jenova inhibitors introduced?"

"By the time we became aware of the problem, it was too late," Faremis said.

"I'm glad you see there's no point in trying to make excuses for not realizing the inhibitors were needed," Hojo said. "I wouldn't have accepted one." He tapped his fingers on the console board beneath the glass window. "We will need to begin repairing 041. 042 just needs to calm down." Hojo smiled. "And now, number three."

"Hm?"

"Number three," Hojo said. "You know, long silver hair, looked like she's hammered? I saw her on TV when she sacked the city. Number three, I want to see number three." Faremis had gone pale.

"I don't think it's the right time."

"Let me see the third one, Faremis," Dr. Hojo said. "Let me see her." Faremis said automatically,

"Him." Hojo glanced up from beneath his hand.

"Him? Really. Fascinating. Let me see him. Now." After a moment, Faremis said,

"Of course."


	9. Chapter 9

**Disclaimer: I won nothing Final Fantasy and Death Note are property of their respective owners.**

"Sephiroth proved to be uncontrollable for a number of reasons, Faremis," Dr. Hojo said as they trekked down yet another broken, gutted hallway. "My failings as a parent, however many they may have been, had nothing to do with Sephiroth's willfulness and pride. Sephiroth was uncontrollable because he was too potent. Too much force, too much energy, too much raw power was concentrated in a single person and this fueled his aggressive arrogance and disdain for authority."

"Of course I didn't mean he failed because of your parenting," Faremis said. Hojo waved his hand dismissively.

"Please don't apologize, as if I care that you insulted my parenting. That won't do anything but embarrass us both."

"I wasn't," Faremis said. They stopped before a metal doorway into another section of the lab, set aside from the others, winging out along the edge of the cliffs that plunged downwards into the northern crater valley dark with evergreens.

"Is this it?"

"He's in here," Faremis said.

"And his number?" A moment of silence. "You didn't give him a number, did you?" Hojo turned to see Faremis, feet planted firmly together, steeled in his resolve, determined not to be intimidated.

"I didn't," Faremis said. "I chose to encourage the family dynamic, and names are a large part of that." Hojo gazed at him with a narrow, slit-eyed suspicion.

"I see," was all he said. "Open up the door, then." Faremis touched the keypad by the entrance, then pulled it back.

"I need to check first. To see if he's…decent."

"Decent? Oh for god's sake—fine, fine, go ahead, see if he's decent, just don't take all goddamned day to do it." Hojo crossed his arms over his chest, frowning as Faremis tapped on the door. Clearing his throat, he called,

"Yazoo? We have—ah—company. We're coming in now." Faremis waited an extra moment by the door.

"Are you waiting for an invitation, Faremis?"

"Of course not—"

"Then open the door," Hojo nudged Faremis aside and opened up the door.

The small size and shape of the room was made all the more apparent in contrast to the few possessions scattered on the surfaces: a lamp made to look like a Wu-tai lantern, a statue of a deer drinking from a pool, a wooden jewelry box with a smudged mirror, empty of jewelry. The room had two windows. One was an observation window, bolted into the wall, that looked out into an adjacent hallway. This was discreetly covered with a faux embroidered red cloth bearing the image of a Wu-tai dragon in fraying thread. The other looked out into the valley. From this one, a cloth had been torn away; only a few tattered pieces were left, shriveled like empty chrysalis' on the curtain rod.

Yazoo was seated on the edge of the bed, profiled against the cool northern. His silver hair, falling down to his mid-back, lay flat and lusterless. He was holding a torn cloth in his hand. Hojo stepped into the doorway. Faremis remained behind him, waiting.

Hojo said nothing. He merely gazed at Yazoo who remained motionless, eyes fixed on the cloth in his hand.

Hojo closed the door again, without disturbing him. When he turned, Faremis was trembling. He was waiting for something, for anything and Hojo, knowing his desperate insecurity, contentedly let the moment for confrontation drift by them.

"Explain to me how he is designed to function," he said.

"What?" Faremis large eyes—big and wet, like a baby's—quivered as he spoke.

"The way the project was originally conceived, we were to split Sephiroth's genes into two separate clones," Hojo said, "thereby retaining all his power but divided into smaller, more manageable units. Where Sephiroth was one man who was far too powerful to be controlled, our little Sephlings would have all his power but portioned out into manageable bites. 041 is Sephiroth's intellect. 042 is his brute strength. Please explain to me what Yazoo is."

"He is the bridge."

"The bridge? Explain."

"041—Kadaj—Kadaj and Loz could not communicate," Faremis said. "There had to be a third, a go-between that facilitated communication between the brain and the strength for Spehiroth."

"I see," Hojo said softly. "And tell me, what is Yazoo? I mean, Kadaj is designed to embody Sephiroth's technical and planning capabilities, Loz his enormous physical strength. So tell me, if you please, what aspect of Sephiroth does our little Yazoo split off and himself embody?" Faremis large, wet eyes stared at Hojo with a quiet, anxious fear.

"His allure," Faremis said.

"His allure?" Hojo asked, lip curling. "You condensed and embodied _my son's allure?"_

"His charisma," Faremis said. "His men, they followed him, Hojo. They loved him, they, they would have died for him, they did die for him. I told you, Hojo, haven't I told you that the clones most vulnerable feature is their emotional centers? Kadaj and Loz were designed to work together: Kadaj planned, Loz carried out those plans. Well, I needed Loz to be obedient to Kadaj. Of course I did. I needed him to follow Kadaj's commands, but they had too much trouble communicating. The intelligence gap between them was too great; Kadaj talks in binary sometimes, and Loz has the vocabulary of a grade school child, that's how we made them, and we never though of such an obvious difficulty. We needed Yazoo, someone to go between the two, to help them communicate with one another. And Yazoo is Sephiroth's charisma, his allure; they both listen to him, both Kadaj and Loz, just like Sephiroth's men listened to him."

"I see," Hojo said. "So, rather than up Loz's intelligence just a bit or, perhaps, telling Kadaj to tone it down on the whole talking-in-binary thing, you opted for the third and, arguably, _insanely more expensive and difficult_ option of creating a third clone to facilitate communication?"

"It was too late to modify the others—"

"It sodding was not!" Hojo snapped. "Kadaj was highly adaptable, highly modifiable!"

"This was the best way because it utilized their most vulnerable—"

"Bullshit, Faremis Gast," Hojo said. "I know exactly why—" But his anger, like most of his emotions, was short lived and easily pacified. They had reached the hall where Kadaj's room was located and he, on seeing Kadaj, was instantly entranced with him: arguably one of the most complex and intricately beautiful things, a fully functioning brain, that Hojo had ever built.

"I'm telling you Hojo," Faremis said. "I am telling you, it worked. It worked, it—"

"Why hasn't he responded to the inhibitors," Hojo asked, laying his hand on the glass. Kadaj remained in the middle of the floor, tracing his arcane binary curses on the witch's floor.

"We haven't been able to administer them," Faremis said. "He doesn't respond to tranquilizers and there is no way to get close to him."

"No way to get close to him?" Hojo said. In response, Faremis removed his jacket and showed his arm, wrapped up in gauze, blood leaking through the white-threaded mesh.

"It," he said, "is impossible to get near him."

"I believe you Faremis," Hojo said and, before Faremis could realize the set-up, he added, "I just thought maybe your whole happy-family-dynamic may have given you an in. I guess daddy is in the doghouse, eh? Nevermind. Grandpa is here now and grandpa does things a little differently."


	10. Door is Opening

**Disclaimer: I won nothing Final Fantasy and Death Note are property of their respective owners.**

_KiloIndiaRomeoAlpha he didn't want us and she didn't want us. Mother and father-brother and no one wanted us._

_KiloIndiaRomeoAlpha_

_5612:04:22:16:33 Bull ugly heart attack. 5612:04:23:22:45 fish eyes heart attack. 5612:04:23:22:46 brick heart attack. 5612:04:23:22:48 bristle bearded heart attack._

_KiloIndiaRomeoAlpha_

_dog fighters train big dogs by making them kill puppies and cats. the dog fighters meet in the broken plates broken broken broken_

_the dog fighters fight inside my head is a broken plate is broken plate broken broken broken_

_Rocky continued to fight after both his legs were broken (broken broken broken). He pushed himself on his chest in his blood at the command of Rick Locas, his owner and trainer. The reporter said that. _

_5612:01:12:13:50 rick locas heart attack_

_KiloIndiaRomeoAlpha_

_protect the dogs the dogs trained to fight_

_mother and father (brother also, bad bad broken) didn't want us_

_KiloIndiaRomeoAlpha_

_someone has to help us_

_KiloIndiaRomeoAlpha_

_door is opening_


	11. Whistle While You Work Hojo is a Jerk

**Disclaimer: I won nothing Final Fantasy and Death Note are property of their respective owners.**

As the last of the light faded in the east, Hojo gathered Faremis and his assistants in the main control room. He ordered the personnel to enter their locked quarters and to remain quiet and stationary until an all clear was given.

He seated himself at the controls, a maestro sitting before his electronic orchestra. He began shifting the hallways, blocking off partitions, sealing exits, and electrifying barriers in open hallways. Expertly, he turned the many converging halls into a long, looping path through the facility, creating a single navigable corridor.

It led from Kadaj's cell to Yazoo's.

"Please observe carefully," he said.

He tapped a button, opening Kadaj's cell.

Down in the cursed room, the witch room, Kadaj lifted his head. He rose and went to the open door, lips parted, with the torn and haggard beauty of a crippled mind, the boneless wings of his torn straight jacket dragging behind him.

He walked out of the open door and down the hall. One door after another was locked. The child—he was fifteen years old—tried them all, flicking buttons and handles, hovering his hands over electro-barriers to feel the charge. Every exit was blocked; Hojo had left only one path open.

Kadaj cam at last to the dead end of the hallway. On the floor was a bottle in which Kadaj's drug cocktail had been dissolved. Hojo had labeled the bottle with a tag that read "Drink Me." The bottle was sitting right in front of the observation window that looked into Yazoo's cell.

The curtains had been removed from the window that looked out into the hall. Kadaj could see Yazoo through the glass, though Yazoo could not see him. Kadaj's body shuddered when he looked in. In an instant he ran up and pressed himself against the glass. Yazoo started at the sound, looked at the window, but could see nothing.

Without warning, Hojo hit a button, opening up the vents in Yazoo's room with a hiss. Kadaj jumped. Yazoo looked up at them, with a miserable, dull curiosity.

Hojo touched another button; this one activated the intercom in the hall where Kadaj stood.

"Kadaj," he said softly into the intercom. "My name is doctor Hojo. Yazoo cannot see or hear you, but you can see him, and I know that you can see the vents that have just opened in his room."

"In a few moments, I will poison your brother. I will inject a toxic gas into the room, and it will become a death room. Yazoo will be very afraid; he will be afraid, and then hurt, and then he will die. I need you to take the water that I have left for you. If you don't do that, you are no use to me, and if I don't need you, then why do I need Yazoo anymore. You must remain useful to me, Kadaj. Please."

Kadaj shook violently as Hojo's voice died away. Yazoo had gone over to the vent, standing on the edge of his bed and looking up into the open vent. Tears rolled soundlessly down Kadaj's face.

"I love you," he called at last, and drank the content of the bottle.

"Good boy," Hojo said. "I'm very happy. Please return to your room now."

In the control room, Hojo turned to Faremis.

"That, my good Faremis, is how I do things," he said. "Family dynamic be damned. You are all dismissed. Except you, Faremis. Please stay here."

The assistants filed out, murmuring amongst one another. Hojo waited until Kadaj was back in his cell before locking it down and sounding an all clear.

"I think I will be staying here for a while. I find it necessary to rehabilitate this project, and besides that you, my low lying friend, have the last working lab in all of Shinra-dom, and I need use of some of your facilities for a little experiment of my own, which I trust you will not begrudge me." He rose from his chair, slapping Faremis on the shoulder.

"It will be just like old times on the Jenova Project!" he laughed warmly, with genuine mirth. "You and me and Lucrezia and Ifalna, do you remember? We were a couple of young stags then, still, there's life in us yet." Hojo's eyes sparkled. "I remember when you first met Ifalna—long haired, soft-eyed creature—locked up in her holding cell. Gah, she was a beauty. Legs up to her neck, as I remember."

Faremis hunched under his hand. The battle was over. Hojo had won. All it was possible to do now would be to ask him, to beg him, to understand.

"You have a tender spot for your prettier test subjects, I know that," Hojo said. "You have the sensibilities of a poet, Faremis, your soul is all imprisoned and weary in these scientific cages. You love beauty and beautiful things, I know, I know, that was why you loved Ifalna so much. You needn't worry; I won't trouble you about the obvious care you take for _Yazoo_."

"You don't understand," Faremis said miserably. "You can't possibly understand."

"I know I don't, Faremis, I know," Hojo said, squeezing the other doctor's shoulders. "But tell me, old friend, why does one buy a jewelry box unless one intends to fill it with jewelry?" Faremis looked down at the ground, blushing, burning.

"You don't understand," he said. "You have to talk to him to understand, you have to see him, to talk to him to understand."

Hojo understood quite well.


	12. How Did Light Get a Job With The Turks?

**Disclaimer: I own nothing. Death Note and Final Fantasy are property of their respective owners.**

Light Yagami awoke the next morning after a few scant hours of sleep, feeling nevertheless refreshed and newly energized. He thrived on purpose, he fed off need and he was ready to begin work the moment his feet touched the floor. He showered quickly, Ryuk hovering listlessly in the steam, and toweled off, mentally working over his plans for the day. He was needed here. The universe had brought him to where his genius and idealism were most required. He would not let it down.

Light had awakened one morning in an unknown room, in a dingy apartment on the top-most plate of an alien world a few months after the disaster at Kalm, a disaster that had shut down the world wide for a second time, shocking the data streams, injuring the digital world.

Light Yagami was a genius at computers.

From a minor cash machine terminal close to a train station, he had found his way into the smoldering circuits of the network. His manipulations of the terminal were subtle and clever enough to trick the system into believing it was witnessing a Synaptic Net Dive.

The sentient creatures of the network had been curious about someone so adept at manipulating their world. They followed him around the city as he continued to explore the net, from terminal to terminal, communicating with him in shy wavelets and ripples of information. He gradually became aware of them. He learned to answer them back, but they could not see inside him and this was what they wanted. They wanted to look into his mind, into the dense bundle of information that was Light Yagami's consciousness. They directed him to one of the last working SND helmets.

To Light, all of life was information. His mind was an immense and powerful engine; inside the net, it was a dense, dazzling nexus of data streams and equations. Diving into the network, his consciousness expanded exponentially. He downloaded as much of Midgar's history as he could learn (though he had realized later that much of what he'd downloaded into himself was partitioned off, locked away in compartments, and that much of it required some careful untangling to release). He had conversed at length with the entities, who were friendly and who encouraged him to download instructions on how to build his own helmet and dive terminal, which he did.

Building his own dive helmet and terminal from junk parts had been tricky, but he'd managed to do it. Dive after dive, he gathered more and more information about Midgar.

In an effort to increase his mobility through the net, Light began the process of organically linking the disconnected parts of the network from within the network itself. The links he made were links of pure information; powerful, indestructible, immaterial links covering vast distances.

The planes of information expanded. All of life was information, The energy of data—bank accounts, credit cards, online journals, files, programs—rose up; it merged with the data of life—nucleotides, protein strands, the chemical blasts of isomerisation, metathesis, halogenation, hydrohalogenation, hydration—formed infinite chains of information.

Genius was Light's religion. Existence was coded and decoded; life was information.

Across Midgar, the shattered terminals and broken computers started coming back on. Something was healing the network. That something was Light Yagami.

In their delight at his care for their injured informational world, (and their over-eagerness, perhaps, for they should have sensed something dark in him) the entities residing on the planes of the network had begun working directly on Light Yagami's brain.

His disembodied information links—they were streams of the pure energy of information—the entities connected directly into his hyper-active, feverishly brilliant mind. His consciousness they linked directly into the converging data streams. They coded and recoded his mind until the electrical fields produced by his brain—the same electrical fields that enabled materia use by giving off activating charges—were open channels emptying into the vast, oceanic planes of the network.

At will, and merely by desiring it, Light could dive into the network. He could dive without a helmet or terminal. He had only to think of the network and her could merge with it.

This ability was what made him of interest to Tseng.

The crippled empire was in desperate need of its city-wide communication grid. Tseng saw in Light a potential aid in rebuilding their systems.

Moreover, Light's rapport with the informational entities and his ability to mathematically navigate informational planes, made him able to find information Tseng needed—information about Shinra and its secret programs that had been hidden even from him.

"Yo, IT Guy," Reno said when Light walked in. "Como estas, hermano?"

"Fine, thanks."

"When am I gonna have my printer up, yo?" Reno called. Light laughed.

"Give me a minute, I need to reconnect plates one and two."

"But my printer," Reno teased. "F*ck, man, I gotta print some sh*t yo."

"I'll get it up soon."

"That's what yo daddy said to yo mama," Reno said

"Oh, gross, thanks for that mental image," Light laughed.

"Anytime, hermano," Reno said. Tseng had appeared in the doorway.

"Reno, can I see you a moment."

"F*ck no, 'cause I don't give two sh*ts about Kira," Reno said, dragging on a cigarette. "Unless this isn't about Kira?"

"It's not."

"Then you have my full attention, _jefe_," he said, unfolding his lanky legs and following Tseng into his office.

Light went to his desk, leaned back in his chair, and dove.

The process of connecting the two plates took longer than Light expected. The information streams were badly damaged, and it took time to redirect the flows of network information. Even with the occasional friendly helping hand from the planar entities, it was slow going.

He quit for the morning, after have successfully linked up two large relay hubs, streamlining their information arcs and buffering them with large protective static rings.

After that, he dove in search of the Shinentai.

He found the history of the War of the Children, encoded in the records of Midgar. It had been a terrible day, emblazoned on the minds of the people, resonating in the rocks, in the earth, in the springs that had poured from the rocks. The energy of the shinentai was imprinted on everything they had touched.

Life was information, waiting to be read.

Light descended through the planes of information into that time, that moment.

He stood in Midgar as it had been on that day. The sin-dark sky gathered close to the ground, lashing it with lightning. A bombardment of thunder rattled the windows. Around him men and women shouted angrily, hurled curses up towards him. He stood on the monument to meteor, looking down on the crowd screaming at him.

They were there, behind him, the children, two of the three lost ones. Loz, powerful and confused, doggedly loyal to his death. And Yazoo.

Life was information; Yazoo flowed down into his spirit.

He watched their lives unfold to their sad, terrible finish. He flew through Midgar—he was pure information—following their movement to their final, glorious incineration. He gathered all the data, penetrating as far as the records would allow into their thoughts and feelings as they wrought their havoc on the city.

Loz's face became miserable and twisted with helplessness.

Kadaj's elfin face tortured him with its malice and anger.

Yazoo's face drew him into its gravity.

Nevertheless, it was Kadaj who had the most powerful brain. His informational signature was the strongest.

Kadaj's informational signature he might be able to locate.

But he searched most of the afternoon, but found nothing.

Light, however, did not give up. If he could not locate the beacon of Kadaj's mind in the information grid, he would find him another way. It would take time and investigation—the old fashioned kind—to find them.

He would start by following the trail of Faremis Gast. Wherever it led.


	13. In Yazoo's Gardenof Hate

**Disclaimer: I own nothing. Death Note and Final Fantasy are property of their respective owners.**

Yazoo sat quietly at the table, a blanket wrapped around bone-thin shoulders. Summer in the Northern Crater saw little change from winter. The snow remained on the ground. The black pine trees bristled thickly along the mountainsides. The icicles melted during the afternoon and froze again at night.

He was allowed outside on days when his brothers were kept in confinement. He was under guard, surrounded by a small contingent of guards, mostly death row inmates who had exchanged their sentences for indefinite work under Faremis Gast. It had been Hojo's idea to take their bodyguards from prisons, instead of the police force. He siphoned them off discreetly, armed them, and commuted their sentences in exchange for their service. He could often be seen chatting with them; he was always curious about their crimes, and listened with great interest to the details of what they had done.

Yazoo's mouth curled when he heard boots crunching in the snow. Faremis Gast came up from behind him, setting a coffee cup on the wire mesh of the outdoor table.

"For you," he said. He sat down beside Yazoo. "I remembered how you like it." He pushed the cup towards Yazoo, who stared at it with vague disgust, and turned back towards the bearded hills. "You're going to keep me out, is that it? You won't even talk to me?" Yazoo let another minute pass.

"When can I see my brothers?" he asked. Behind him, Faremis stiffened. He cleared his throat.

"Soon, of course. I wouldn't be keeping you apart if I didn't have to—"

"You don't have to," Yazoo said.

"But Kadaj's condition has not yet improved."

"And Loz?"

"Loz continues to require restraint," Faremis said. Yazoo's fingers curled tighter on the blanket.

"If you let me see him, I could calm him down," Yazoo said. "Even if you just let him see me, it would work." Yazoo could feel Faremis growing more resistant. He turned around to look at him. Soft, reddish hair, not yet gray or even thinning, an older man's age-softened body, steel-rimmed glasses. He had never tried to hide his feelings, though he had once or twice made a great show of trying to suppress them. Yazoo saw everything there: arousal and need; the sullen, passive anger of wounded love; humiliation, and a kind of delight in humiliation because it seemed to close to true humility.

Yazoo turned back towards the trees, silently. Hatred for that face—sullen, humiliated, lustful—washed over the breakwaters of Yazoo's calm, terrible mind.

_I cannot do this again._

A few minutes passed in silence. Faremis remained beside Yazoo, pushing his coffee cup around in a circle by the handle.

"I don't care about what happened," he said at last, his voice a wet, fleshy sound in the icy northern air. "I don't care about the escape, about Edge City. I know that you…I see that you needed something I wasn't giving you, but I forgive you. Can't you forgive me?"

Yazoo spun around, silver hair whipping the snowy air.

"Stop it," he hissed. "Stop it, he'll see you."

"Who? Hojo?" Faremis said. And then, with furious, lustful conviction: "I don't care. I'm not afraid of what he thinks."

"Stop," Yazoo hissed.

"We can make it through this," Faremis said. He laid a hand on Yazoo's arm. Yazoo's flesh recoiled from him, riding up his bones.

"You think I'm afraid of him?" Faremis, now almost in a fit, leapt up from the seat. "Yazoo, I'm not afraid of anything!"

To his horror, Yazoo saw Hojo's face in a window of an adjacent wing, looking into the snowy courtyard.

"I don't care what happened," Faremis fell on his knees before Yazoo, who stared down at him with mute horror, his mouth open, caught somewhere between a laugh and a scream.

"Stop it!" Yazoo hissed again. Faremis came forward on his knees, tossing up the white snow.

"I don't care about the arm or the lab," he said. "I don't care about any of that." He clasped His hands over Yazoo's knees. His face trembled with humiliated lust and sullen, wounded love. "I…I don't even care if you did anything with _him_." Yazoo flared.

"Be quiet, you, be quiet!" he said. He didn't dare to look up at the window, didn't dare to look at Hojo. "Please, just be quiet."

"I don't care, Yazoo," Faremis said. "I don't care anymore, even if you did do something with _him_. He had no right to touch you, he's no better than an animal, and I wouldn't blame you if you felt—if you were nervous or shy now because of something he, your own brother, did to you. But I—I love you."

"Stop it!"

"I don't care what you've done, Yazoo!" Yazoo could take no more. He rose up from his seat.

Oh what exquisite, what monstrous beauty was Yazoo's. There were sirens tangled in the gray, sea-mist hair. The dark hollow of his mouth unsealed the weedy cave of Grendel's loping mother. Gorgons concealed themselves in the curves of his delicate limbs and slender body. Half-animal, hateful of men, Yazoo fell murderously on Faremis.

"You want to know if I f*cked him?" Yazoo hissed. "You want to know if I had him on top of me, in me, how big he was, how it hurt, how I loved the hurt and licked up the blood? Maybe I f*cked them both? Maybe I f*cked every man I met, just because I could!"

And it would have been a welcome change if his outburst had had any effect on Faremis. As it was, he only gazed at Yazoo with the same tragic, self-pitying sadness and wounded, humiliated lust.

"I hate him, if he touched you. Your own brother, you own—"

"Maybe it wasn't just him. Maybe I f*cked all of them, everyone I met!" Yazoo threw back the blanket. "I laughed at you while I did, while I f*cked them, and I told them how humiliated I was, how—"

An alarm sounded from one of the wings.

Yazoo started. Faremis jumped to his feet. He put his hands on Yazoo's shoulders.

"It's nothing, don't worry," he said.

It would have been a welcome change if Faremis really had been spontaneously and naturally concerned for Yazoo's safety. This was not the case. Faremis expression told Yazoo that he was conscious of how he martyred himself, thinking only of Yazoo's safety when Yazoo had been so recently cruel to him. Yazoo's head throbbed with anger.

"Come on, lets get inside," Faremis said. Under the watchful eyes of the guards in the towers, Yazoo followed him inside.


	14. Idiopathic Myocardial Infarction

**Disclaimer: I own nothing. Death Note and Final Fantasy are property of their respective owners.**

"It is the strangest thing that a healthy man should just…drop dead," Faremis had regained himself somewhat and leaned over the body of the young guard, who had come to Gast straight from a life sentence for murder, that was sprawled in the middle of the floor, still clutching his gun. "I think an autopsy is in order."

"Idiopathic myocardial infarction," Hojo said. "There's no need for an autopsy. That's exactly what the results will say. Idiopathic myocardial infarction."

"A spontaneous heart attack?" Gast asked.

"Yes, good gods, Faremis, haven't you been paying any attention to what happens outside your lab?" Hojo asked. "It's Kira."

"Kira?" Gast asked. "Who is that?"

"Who or what, no one is quite sure yet," Hojo said. "All we know about him is that he is a nasty, self-righteous little whelp who doesn't like criminals and doesn't need line of sight to make that dislike known." He shrugged, "Might as well just toss him in the incinerator."

"Kira kills criminals?" Yazoo looked at Hojo, then at Faremis. Faremis smiled reassuringly at Yazoo.

"There's no need to be frightened," he said.

"But we're criminals," Yazoo said. "All of us."

"I think what Faremis means Ifalna—er—Yazoo, is that there is no _point_ in being afraid," Hojo said. Faremis winced. "If he's out to get us, he'll get us. But I don't think he is."

"Why not?" Yazoo asked. He flashed on his brothers; Edge city; mother.

"I watched five of my best body guards drop dead a while ago," Hojo said. "Nothing, not so much as a bad case of indigestion, bothered me. My best guess is that they were killed because they were in the system—tried, judged, sentenced, etc. That's the only reason I can figure, since I've done far worse than anything they could have come up with." He smiled, "Unless our Kira is a scientists who respects crimes done in the name of research. But I doubt it."

Two large men had appeared, dressed in the faded blue overalls of sanitation employees. They grabbed the body and hoisted it up onto a stretcher.

"Are you sure we shouldn't do an autopsy?" Faremis asked.

"Quite sure I'm not going to waste my time on it," Hojo said. "You can if you like. I have my own experiments to attend to."

"What?" Faremis was genuinely taken aback. He seemed to forget about Yazoo for a moment, striding up to Hojo with uncharacteristic outrage. "What experiments? You didn't tell me—"

"I told you I needed to make use of your facilities, as they were the last ones available in Midgar, _thankyouverymuch,"_ Hojo said. "You're welcome to see, of course."

A tense moment passed between the two.

"The men in this lab answer to me, Hojo," Faremis said. "Remember that."

"I have a feeling, Faremis, that no one in this lab answers to you who wouldn't rather answer to me," Hojo said. "I'm a guest. I'm aware of that. But better to be a gracious host, don't you think? Hostile takeovers are ugly things." Hojo walked off in the direction of the western wing. "You may come and see my experiment if you like. It's quite interesting."

After a minute, Yazoo followed Hojo. He didn't know why, or even how far Faremis would let him get. The physically weakest of the three clones—a thing designed for beauty and grace, not force and speed—Yazoo depended on his brothers to protect him. He depended, but that did not bother him. The three brothers, when they were together, existed in seamless symbiosis. It was here, when he was alone, that he felt himself vulnerable.

Hojo, however, was delighted at Yazoo's curiosity.

"Right here," he said with the cheerful good humor. "It's in this room, in one of the containment tanks." He linked his arm with Yazoo's, talking with animated enthusiasm. "This will be, without a doubt, the most important project since Sephiroth."


	15. The Greatest Project Since Sephiroth

**Disclaimer: I own nothing. Death Note and Final Fantasy are property of their respective owners.**

Hojo led Yazoo inside one of the enormous, steel-silver containment rooms. Cylindrical holding units lined the walls like upright coffins bolted into the flat fireproof paneling, their glass coverings making the pitiful bodies inside visible.

Today, most of them were empty, save for one, the main unit. The main unit, standing in the center of the vast room, was a glass tube that offered a 360 degree view of the experiment within. This unit was attached to the control panels and various chemical pumps: it was the place where the experiment itself could take place and, at the touch of a few buttons, chemicals could be mixed, siphoned off, and combined, accumulations and reactions logged and monitored.

Within the unit was a man. He seemed to be in suspended animation, his expression troubled by a few lines on an otherwise smooth, young and very handsome face. He was Wu-Taian in appearance, with golden skin and long, dark hair. Yazoo had only ever seen one other Wu-Taian before. For a moment, with complete innocence, he thought the man in the holding unit might be Tseng.

"What is he?" Yazoo asked.

"He is…a very powerful vortex of dark energy, for lack of a better term," Hojo said, rounding the side of the tank, his gaze fixed on the man's face. Yazoo touched the tank. A spark snapped at his fingers. "Yes, be careful," Hojo said. "There is an immense, terrible power concentrated in this entity you see."

"You didn't make him then?" Gast had come in and stood before the tank. Hojo laughed.

"Not anymore than I made the Calamity, no, Faremis, no I didn't cook him up in a cauldron. I found him. Just like you found—though I correctly identified—Jenova," Hojo said. "And anyway, he is nothing like Jenova. Jenova was an alien life form. This thing you see here—_my discovery_—is more along the lines of Chaos or Omega, only multiplied exponentially. This is a being of the pure, condensed, energy of destruction."

"And what exactly are you going to do with him?" Faremis asked.

"Right now I am just trying to understand him," Hojo said. "But the potential for weaponizing this kind of energy is virtually limitless." Hojo turned to Yazoo, who's gaze was fixed on the man's face. "Handsome, isn't he?" 

"He is," Yazoo said absently. Something about the man was tragic and compelling, as though he were aware of some great tragedy.

"Its getting late," Faremis said suddenly. "Its probably time for you to return to your quarters, Yazoo. I think you've had enough excitement for one day." Yazoo's expression hardened. Hojo snorted.

"Yes, of course, well, I'm going to be working a while longer," he said. "You two go off to bed…or is it just Yazoo who's tucking in for the night?" Faremis reddened. Hojo chuckled to himself and went back to his experiment.

Faremis escorted Yazoo from the room. Neither one of them said anything. Yazoo cast one look back at the man, suspended in the clear liquid of the tank, and thought that he would have liked to have known his name.


	16. Rumination

**Disclaimer: I own nothing. Death Note and Final Fantasy are property of their respective owners.**

In another place, a place whose complex spatio-temporal relation to Midgar cannot be explained in a few words, Matt—or M2 as he was sometimes known—finally put down his video game controller. He pressed pause and placed it in front of him and sat for a while, looking from the grayed-out screen, to the controller, to the game box with its incredible cover art.

He took a deep breath, then went into the main video-control center of the hotel.

"Hey guys," he said as he walked in.

L, Mello, and Near were all gathered around one of the desks. Papers—passenger lists from jets and boats, missing persons reports, suspicious activity reports, police sightings—were spread out between them. Computers showing video feeds from the Yagami house, from Sayu Yagami's school, from To-oh campus, were set up around them. The three didn't look up when he came in, except for L, who smiled.

"Hi Matty," he said. He stretched and nibbled on a piece of sugar cube. "How are you?"

"Fine," he said. He stood in the doorway, mouth pursed in thought. He stood that way for a good few minutes before he said, "look, I have something to tell you guys."

"What is it, number 3?" Near asked without looking up, twirling one of his curls.

"Speak now, or forever hold your piece," Mello said, also without looking up.

"You know how you guys are all upset, because Light Yagami disappeared two years ago, and then L called both of you guys in because he needed all the help he could get, and I came with Mello, and we still can't find him, and the Kira killings have stopped, but you guys can't understand how he escaped when he was being monitored 24/7, and you're worried about what he'll do now?"

"Thanks, Captain Recap," Mello said.

"Matt, are you going to do something useful?" Near asked.

"Yes, Matt, we know all that, what is it?" L asked.

"Well…" Matt stopped. He thought about what he was going to say for another few seconds, then, "He's in my video game." Both Near and Mello looked up at him.

"What?" L asked.

"What's he on about?" Mello asked.

"What did you say?" Near asked.

"Yeah, he's totally in my video game. In my new _Final Fantasy XIV: Apotheosis_ game. He's totally in my game."

They all stared at him for a minute. Then Mello said,

"Matt, seriously, it's just a character who looks like him."

"No no," Matt said. "It's him. My character default name is Light Yagami and everything. I've been leveling him up for, like, twenty hours now."

"Are you sure?" L asked, getting up from his chair.

"Yeah, totally. Like, I didn't say anything at first because to be honest, I was so high I thought I was in the game too, but now Teru's in my game too, and I just figured I better say something."

"Mikami is in your game too?" Mello said.

"Yeah, Hojo's doing an experiment on him. E's calling him some kind of 'vortex of dark energy,' maybe the greatest project since Sephiroth which…I dunno, I mean, that would be pretty big. Anyway, we should be prepared for Teru to get injected with Jenova and become super-powerful, 'cause that's what Hojo's experiments always amount to. Just thought you should know."

"He's high," Near said.

"He's barking," Mello said.

"Just come look. And if he's not there, and you don't think its him, then I can just go back to playing in peace. Just…just come look."

The four detectives huddled around the computer screen, watching as Matt's party—consisting of Light, Tseng, and Rufus—battled their was down from the 70th floor of Shinra headquarters in Midgar.

"What the shit is Light doing?" Mello said.

"Near as I can figure, he must have gone into hiding and somehow convinced Squarenix to put his likeness in a video game," Matt said. "Why he would do that I don't—f*ck!" Light was k.o.'d, along with Tseng and Rufus. "God damnit I can't beat this stupid Crush Beats! I need that esper, you son of b*tch."

"Matt, this is a little more important than leveling—"

"I am not leveling up, Mello," Matt said, wheeling his controller furiously. "I am trying to get Light's other esper."

"His other esper? Who's his first esper?" Mello asked.

"Some ugly esper named Ryuk," Matt said.

"Oh," Mello said.

"I'd like to see that esper," L said, sitting cross-legged before the screen,

"I'll show him to you in a second," he said. "I need to go back to my last save. I think my problem is that right now I have Light's HP hooked up to death materia and his attack hooked up to bio. But you just can't poison this stupid Crush Beast!."

"Matt, how long will it take you to beat this battle?" L asked.

"Few minutes, I swear," Matt said.

"Can I see all the little movies after?"

"The cut-scenes," Matt said. "Yeah, sure, no problem."

He sent Light, Rufus, and Tseng into the battle once more.


	17. Chapter 17

**Disclaimer: I own nothing. Death Note and Final Fantasy are property of their respective owners.**

"What I want to know if how a Crush Beast got into the office in the first place," Rufus said, clutching Dark Nation to him and petting the enormous cat on the head.

"I don't know," Tseng said.

"It must have been trying to keep warm," Light said, reloading his sidearm. "This is one of the only heated buildings left in Midgar."

"It's gone now," Reno said to Rufus, with just a little condescension. "Don't you worry, Mr. President."

"Thanks, Reno," Rufus shot him a glare. He smiled at Tseng and Light. "Sorry to keep you working overtime all the time."

"Of course its nothing," Tseng sat on the end of the desk, next to Rufus' chair. "Are you sure you're all right?" He stroked the side of Rufus' face. Rufus smiled, looked away.

"I'm fine, Tseng," he said. "I'm just fine."

"Think I can go?" Light whispered Reno.

"I think you're off the hook, yo," Reno said.

"I'll see you tomorrow," Light said.

"Mañana," Reno called after him as Light left down the stairs.

Light, however, did not go home. He went down, deep in the underground vaults of the Shinra building.

At the ground level of Shinra headquarters, past a series of ghostly, unmanned security checkpoints was the elevator that led to the second level clearance: the second level entrance, an underground checkpoint and decontamination point for those entering and exiting the reactor.

This floor had been abandoned for years. Yellow haz-mat suits still hung along the walls. A desk and a swiveling office chair behind it were covered in dust, plaster, and insulation that had come loose when Emerald Weapon had attacked. The guard's computer terminal was still open. A handwritten log book, still filled with old Shinra forms, was open on the desk. All that was left of any personnel was the cryptic message—begun, but never finished, on the day that emerald weapon had unleashed its fury on the building.

"_Status: Active Norm—"_

Light had to break the lock on the door that would bring him into the decontamination room. The doors of the decontamination room had sealed shut during Emerald Weapon's attack. He had to power them back up and wait the designated eighty minutes required for full decontamination before he could get to the last elevator, the one that led to the smoldering ruins of the medical facility known as Deepground.

A gray patina of dust was thick over the turbines and the checkerboard of materia cells inlaid on the floor. The conducting tubes, through which the heat generated by the material mixed with water in order to become steam had come loose. Water trickling in from the ground dripped into the cooling vats, gathering in glowing green pools of materia rich liquid. The enormous fans of the steam turbines were still, thick roots of light-sensitive, cave-native plants curling among the slats.

The medical center that had once been attached to reactor 0 had been exposed to concentrated blasts of materia once Emerald Weapon had attacked. The levels of materia were so high that most of the delicate machinery used in the medical center had been damaged beyond repair. The circuits and relays were fused together, melted, or shattered; even the outer casings were dented inward with the force of the materia blast they had experienced. The neon green water pools cast spectral light on the dead facility.

The doctors of death had all been here. They had all worked here. Hojo, Crescent, Hollander, and Gast had all begun here. Light experienced the chill of inhabiting the same space they had once inhabited.

When Hojo had digitized his consciousness here, in the shuddering death throes of Deepground, he had destroyed the electronic records. The machines would be useless to Light. If there were any records left they were in boxes, written on paper, deep in storage.

It took him the better part of the evening to find them, big cardboard boxes sealed with reflective tape. He found x-rays, patient records, and charts signed with names he recognized: Dr. Hojo, Dr. F. Gast, and Dr. H. Hewley. All of them had been here. All of them had seen their patients here, had worked here as physicians, as healers, before the terror of Jenova and the frenzy to uncover its secrets had wiped the sanity from them. Light set aside every chart that Faremis Gast had signed. He was looking for a pattern, for clues as to where the three clones might be.

Light spent the night sleeplessly in the decrepit ruin of Deepground, bathed in the glow of the green water, working over and over through each piece of evidence until a pattern appeared, and the whole scope of the problem began to make sense.

"Ryuk, look at this," he said.

"What is it, Light?"

"The Jenova experiments were scattered all over the country, right?"

"I guess so."

"They were. These scientists had all sorts of bases and facilities, always disguised to looked like they served some legitimate purpose, but ultimately all of them facades concealing a program of human experimentation. Still with me?"

"Yes."

"Now, what do all these various locations have in common?"

"I don't know."

"These Jenova experiments were always, _always_, conducted either under or very close to a mako reactor. Mt. Nibel, Banora, Deepground: reactor, reactor, reactor."

"Ohhhhhh," Ryuk said.

"Yes. Now, why is that?"

"No idea, Light."

"Neither do I," Light said. "But, I have a theory. Come on."


	18. Deepground

**Disclaimer: I own nothing. Death Note and Final Fantasy are property of their respective owners.**

Down on a lower level was the Deepground experimentation chamber. The shattered glass tubes of the wall-mounted containment units glittered sharp, like teeth, in the green water-light. The central unit, with its corona of consoles and tangled dendrites of wires connecting into the walls, floors, and ceiling, remained intact. A pale, oily shine coated the inside the glass and a black tar, with a moist, opalescent shine, pooled in the empty container.

"Jenova," Light breathed. "Ryuk, look, this is Jenova."

"Dare you to touch it," Ryuk said.

"No," Light said.

"Double dog dare you to touch it."

"Shut up," Light said. "I need to prove something. Here, help me."

"No. Not unless I get an apple."

"I wish L was here," Light snapped. "You're stupid and useless. Fine, I'll do it myself." Light went to the circuit breakers on the wall. "I'm going to restore power."

He threw the switches.

The room hummed softly; energy swarmed in the walls and consoles, vibrating in the dense tangle of wires and in the ducts beneath the floor.

"Now," Light said. "Let's see if I'm right." He pulled out a small, hand-held console.

"What's that?"

"A meter reader," Light said. "It measures how much power something uses."

"You have a meter reader?"

"I work for a glorified power company, its standard issue."

"Oh."

"I'm going to turn on the containment unit now. Remember, these containmenr units were used in every Jenova experiment. Strife, Rhapsodos, Fair, even Sephiroth was held in one of these while the doctors worked on him," Light said. "Okay, here it goes." Holding the meter reader poised, he threw switches on the containment unit.

A pale blue glow began at the crown of the unit. A energy field coated the glass, putting a barrier of pure power between the glass of the unit and the outside. The top of the glass tube twisted, the wires shaking like medusa hair.

The meter reader's arrow flew to its highest point and stayed there, straining to go farther. The hum became a roar of power; a surge rebounded, shaking the walls, and plunging the room into silent darkness, illuminated only by the green pools.

"I was right," Light said. "Its these containment units. They require an enormous amount of power to run."

"So…?"

"So Dr. Hojo and Dr. Gast weren't stupid. They needed those containment units to hold the Jenova, and the Jenova creations they produced. Those containment units required an immense amount of power to run. It only makes sense that they would build their laboratories underneath mako reactors. Hooking directly into the turbines, or setting aside turbines for themselves, they could have all the power they needed to run the unit."

"Oh. Now I get it. Sorry but the plot is so confusing sometimes." Light sighed.

"I know exactly what we have to do now."

"What?"

"I need to dive into the net," Light said. "Kadaj, Loz, and Yazoo are Jenova creations. If they are being held somewhere, chances are one of these containment units will be in use, or at least be on active standby. That will be an enormous power drain on the grid."

"Oh. But I thought you said these facilities were built over their own sources of power?"

"They are," Light said. He had gone to the large, steel file cabinets on the far wall. "But I'm betting that when Kadaj and his brothers escaped the first time, they damaged whatever lab they came from pretty badly. I would be very surprised if the power supply wasn't the first thing they took out. I'm guessing that if there is a Jenova lab out there that is still operational, its drawing off the grid right now."

"And if its not?"

"Then I'll start going through Shinra's old plans and see if any Mako reactors were built that were never officially used."

"Oh," Ryuk said. "Yeah, I guess that works. When are you going?"

"Tomorrow, first thing in…the…" Light trailed off.

He stood in the shadow of the steel file cabinet. A box of all charts, filled with notes written in the delicate hand of a young woman was set beside him, on one of the dead consoles. Among the standard boxes and lines marked by asterisks as mandatory, the young woman had written her own tender notes in the margins.

Beside a box, to be checked if a specimen had shown hydration, she had written _"I felt him kicking!"_

Just beneath a line on which she had written out the technical specifications of a mako wash, she wrote: _"I love you more than you know."_

On the back of a chart on which she had logged all the recently delivered supplies, she had written: _"He's coming soon. He wants to meet his daddy."_

Light sat down on the ground, looking carefully over each sheet. There were only a few notes, written with the unprofessional enthusiasm of a first-time mother.

And one other, in a hand that was not hers.

On the back of a report on the saline levels in one of the desalinization pumps, a low order report that would have been handed in by an employee little better than a janitor, and probably to the first doctor who would take the time to look at it and sign it; on the back of that page was a drawing.

The statuesque shoulders of a young woman lay perpendicular to a long, pillared neck and sharp profile. Long hair washed down towards the soft bump of shrouded buttocks beneath a provocatively dipping back. Her eyes were downturned, her full lips parted as though at the moment of a deep sigh. Beneath it was written one word:

–_Ekatne, girl of my dreams._

The face was Yazoo's.


	19. Winter Rumination

Yazoo stood beside the table. It was winter, ludicrosly cold outside, far too cold to be out of doors. Yet Faremis insisted; he insisted on walking Yazoo, walking like a nurse escorting a dangerous mental patient in a little circle round a dismal, barbed wire courtyard. He insisted, though it was humiliating, insisted even though it was pointless.

Yazoo's eyes looked out to the cliffs, the cliffs that plunged down into the crater.

He could jump the fence. He could take it in one leap. And then, that would be all. Then his days would be free. One little leap—a tuck of the legs, a little thrust of propulsion over the sides of the cliffs—and then nothing.

Nothing else. Just peace. He felt the knot in his chest and abdomen releasing at the thought of his days, all the gray uniform days suddenly wiped clean of their humiliating, hateful captivity, all the more grotesque because of the farce of family affection and the terrible, domestic monotony of the heaving lust he bore on his chest at night.

Tears stung his eyes. One leap. One leap was all it would take. Then nothing. His days would open up, free. He would drink in the freedom through those empty days. One leap, then freedom.

Then he saw Kadi in his mind. Kadi, the baby, who had believed up until the very last moment that Sephiroth would save him, would save them all. And Lo; fearless, savagely beautiful and loyal to his death, locked in the airless, lightless blast box.

He collapsed on the ground, trembling. He could not leave them and he knew it.

The days closed up again, crushing his heart under the weight of the hours.


	20. The Power Drain in the North

**Disclaimer: I own nothing. Death Note and Final Fantasy are property of their respective owners.**

Tseng stood with his second in command, Reno, looking down at the printout Light had given them. A clock ticking on the wall above them portioned out the silence, until Reno spoke.

"F*ck."

"It isn't necessarily what we think it is," Tseng said.

The printout Light had given them showed the power grid spread out over the city. Each household and business was designated by a color that showed the amount of power it averaged per day. Blue was the least, an apartment; yellow an average commercial business; orange a factory; and red a government facility or hospital.

Carefully highlighted were a number of surge anomalies that pointed to a massive power drain happening in the northern crater, a bright red flare of on the smooth, white topography of the north.

"F*ck, f*cking f*ck," Reno said. He slammed his fist into the wall. "F*cking gods, f*cking damn it, what the hell else could it be? What is it ever, _Jefe_?"

"It might be any number of things," Tseng said.

"A f*cking power drain that big? In the f*cking northern crater, f*cking, jenova northern crater? Really, _Jefe_, you think it's anything other than some f*cking containment units sucking up my power? Gods f*cking damn it!"

"When did you find out about this?" Tseng asked.

"Just last night," Light said. "I noticed the anomalies weren't starbursts, they were streaming. The vectors all converged at a single location. I thought you should know about it."

"Yeah, thanks, you've made my day f*cking piece of sh*t now," Reno said. "I'm not mad at you, I'm mad at whatever's out there."

"If it's a power drain this big, and its in the northern crater, chances are we're looking at another Jenova facility," Tseng conceded at last, mouth tense over the admission.

"Great," Reno said. "What do you think they're cooking up this time? What, maybe some giant mako-breathing gila monsters stuffed to the gils with Jenova? Oh, maybe some more Sephiroth clones, that's always fun. Hey, maybe Hojo just finally decided to f*ck the middle man and he's just sticking himself full of Jenova! That's what my money's on."

"I don't think so," Light said. Both Tseng and Reno looked at him. Light considered a moment, then. "I found this."

"This, what 'this,' what is 'this'?" Reno asked. Light produced the shard of metal.

"Let me see that?" Tseng said.

"It's from a flash-bang grenade," Light said. "It fell out of a dump truck."

Tseng read it, mouth tightening further as he did. He handed it to Reno, who read it amid a few colorful curses.

"F*ck my life," he said as he put it down.

"I know the official Shinra story has always been that the shinentai were produced spontaneously from the Jenova, that they were 'remnants,'" Light said. "I think that it may be time to acknowledge the possibility that Loz, Kadaj, and Yazoo were Sephiroth clones—successful clones—who were products of Shinra research and experimentation."

"That was always a possibility," Tseng said softly. "But when Elena and I were in the Northern Crater we looked, Light. We honestly and sincerely looked. We both went there believing that we'd find some kind of laboratory. We never found anything."

"But you were ambushed early," Light said.

"That's true, _Jefe_," Reno said. "And there wasn't much time to play 'Let's find the secret base' after that, yo."

"I know that," Tseng said. He looked down at the power grid printout and at the shard of the flash-bang. "This is decent evidence of something going on in the Northern Crater."

"If Hojo's there, I am going to f*cking tear out his eyeballs," Reno said. "You can't do experiments without eyeballs, yo."

"Shinra's policy up until this point has always been to deny the existence of Jenova projects," Tseng murmured. He looked out the window of his office, down into the streets of Midgar.

"Yeah, that's like denying the presence of the eight-hundred-pound gorilla in the room," Reno said. "Nobody believes it and you look like an ass."

"At this point, I have to agree with Reno," Light said.

"So do I," Tseng said. "And so does Rufus. He's not his father and he doesn't want to be." Tseng went quiet, a stern, proud figure silhouetted against the gray, evening sky against which the buildings, sparkling with veins of shinra power, began to glow. "What do you suggest?"

"We cut the power and raid that sh*t, yo," Reno said, running his fingers through his red hair, twirling his mag-rod nervously in his other hand.

"I can cut the power," Light said. "I just want to be certain that it won't hurt them."

"Hurt who?"

"The clones," Light said. "If they are in the containment unit when the power goes off—"

"Then they'll get out," Reno said. "Then it us you have to worry about, not them."

"All right," Tseng said. "I will get Rufus' okay tonight. Plan for it tomorrow. Reno, scramble the elites—what we have left. Light be ready, on my signal, to cut the power."

"Yes sir," Light said.

"You got it, _Jefe,"_ Reno said. "Let's do this, yo."


	21. Vigilantes

**Disclaimer: I own nothing. Death Note and Final Fantasy are property of their respective owners.**

Both Light and Reno had gone to the door when Tseng called Light back. He motioned to the chair in front of is desk. Light sat down, looking at Tseng with as much calm as was compatible with respect. For a while Tseng stood quietly behind his desk, looking down at the streets below. Then, turning,

"You say this fell out of a dump truck."

"Yes," Light said.

"This," Tseng said, "this is addressed to Kira." His voice was deep when he spoke, a grave, sonorous baritone.

"It is also scratched into a shard of a bio flashbang grenade," Light said. "I think it was intended to reach whoever it could."

"But you take it very seriously," Tseng said. His black, upswept eyes searched Light's golden ones.

"Yes," Light said. "Sir with all due respect, no one should depend on a vigilante—"

"Everyone here depends on vigilantes, Light," Tseng said. "Cloud is a vigilante; so is Vincent, and so are Tifa, Barrett, Cid. Every one of us depends upon vigilantes."

"But they shouldn't have to, Sir," Light said. A heat swelled in his chest. The passion to rescue, to save, it was strong in Light, and it carried his words to Tseng. "Sir, we have a chance, and a viable one, to change in a profound way. I saw that note, and I did not see it as addressed to Kira, but to me, and to us. Yes, I took it upon myself to investigate it, and I gave my findings to you. We should respond to this, not Kira. We must answer this appeal."

"I see," Tseng said. He was quiet for a minute. "Be ready on my signal, yes?"

"Yes, sir."

"Thank you, Light. You're dismissed."

At the ebb of evening, when the moonlight silvered the mako blasts that arched across the sky, Light stood on the ledge outside the building, his black trenchcoat—his 'thing' since Rude had sunglasses, Reno tattoos and goggles, Tseng his gloves, and Elena her being-a-girl—outstretched like wings on the wind.

He took the paper with the portrait, the relic of a strange obsession begun long ago in the mind of Faremis Gast, and held it.

She was beautiful. And he, Yazoo, was as beautiful as he had been envisioned, even down to the curve of the hips and the softness of sadness around the full, sighing mouth.

He looked towards the northern sky, the stars hanging cold above the glacial mountains.

_Hang on_, he thought. _Hang on just a little while longer. I'm coming. No one shall ever appeal to Kira in vain. _


	22. They are coming for us'

**Disclaimer: I own nothing. Death Note and Final Fantasy are property of their respective owners.**

"Hurry, Yazoo, hurry!" Faremis rushed Yazoo, wrapped in a heavy quilt, down the hall. The lab was silent, the air the empty, drifting stillness that comes with the total absence of energy. The perpetual hum of electricity—the omnipresence of Shinra—was gone. The quiet exhalation of the falling snow crept in through the weakened door frames and the cracked casements or the lab.

Something had happened. Yazoo's heart clenched.

"I won't leave without Kadi," he wheeled around. "I won't go without my brothers." Faremis stopped and for a moment he prepared to be hurt, to savor another injury from cruel, unforgiving Yazoo. Instead, he said,

"Of course no, of course, my pet," he stroked the side of Yazoo's face. Yazoo did not recoil, but simply stared at him. "Kadaj is in a portable containment unit. It has enough charge to run without power for three days."

"And Loz?" Faremis mouth twitched.

"He's been loaded already," Faremis said. Yazoo's mind raced. Heart pounding, he said,

"Where is he? Let me see him! Let me see Kadi, let me know they're all right!"

"Of course they're all right, of course, of course," Faremis said. "But really, if I let you all go together, if I let you see—how could I be sure you wouldn't run away from me? Yazoo, how could I—I couldn't bare that, it would kill me. How could I bare if you would run from me again?" Yazoo fought back tears of rage. Faremis took them for tears of sadness. "I'm sorry. Soon. Soon."

"What are you doing?" Hojo ran towards them. His face was drawn tight with concern, nevertheless he was still smiling. Smiling with the sheer rapture of excitement, of the cat-and-mouse he played eternally with Shinra.

"I'm explaining to Yazoo—"

"My dear," Hojo said. "Shinra is coming. They are coming for us, and when they do, they will burn all our research. They will burn our research and they will destroy our experiments. You understand what that means, don't you? They will kill you, angel, they will kill both you and your brothers. I know you don't trust me, or Faremis, but think of Shinra, and if there is anyone you trust less, should it not be them?" Yazoo's lidded eyes were wide.

"They—they found us?"

"They have," Hojo said. "They've cut the power and they are coming. Do you understand what that means?" Yazoo was silent for a moment, In the dark, deep calm of his half-human heart, he was silent.

"Yes," he said.

"Good, good," Hojo said. He glanced at Faremis. "I've finished loading Kadaj into the boat. We'll meet up with my ship in less than a few hours. From there, the CU's can pull energy from the underwater reactor. For now, I need your help. We need to burn our files."

"Yazoo, come with me," Faremis said. "Come along."

Yazoo went with them to the main storage unit, where hard copies were kept. He stood in the doorway, in the rapidly cooling interior of the base, watching Faremis and Hojo throw files into a materia fire Hojo had started in the middle of the room.

In the confusion, Yazoo slipped from the room. His mind was racing. He distrusted Shinra, but Hojo and Faremis had been his tormentors for too long for him to take their word as truth.

His mind flashed on the event weeks ago, the message Kadi had clawed into the shard of metal while the guards were wrestling Loz into the blast box.

It was not possible. This was not a rescue, it was an attack. He had to tell himself this, or it would kill him. Hope would kill him.

He ran into the training room. The surveillance monitors there were self-contained, and didn't pour their data into the main computers. Those would have been wiped, but not these.

He made one graceful leap into the air, grabbed one of the cameras and took out the digital recording card. Another leap restored the camera.

He ran now. He ran with all his speed through the guards who didn't pay a second thought to him as they tried to destroy all the records of their existence. He ran into the only other room with self-contained monitors: the assessment room.

Assessment had been Faremis special denotation for torture. This was the place where Faremis had allowed his assistants to test 'the efficacy of their treatments and correctives' on Kadaj and Loz, though never on Yazoo.

Yazoo bared his teeth at the thought of what those surveillance monitors would contain. He wanted all those tapes, but he would only have time to get one.

Leaping to grab it, this time he held his light body up by hanging from the jointed arm that held the surveillance monitor and extracted the card. He dropped back down onto the ground with a soft gasp, and ran.


	23. The Stone Path

**Disclaimer: I own nothing. Death Note and Final Fantasy are property of their respective owners.**

He ran outside, into the courtyard.

Last year, Faremis had made a path of garden stones winding in a circle around the courtyard. These were for his 'walks' with Yazoo, and Yazoo had cordially detested them. Now he ran for them, part of him delighting that they would be Faremis downfall.

He brushed the snow away, uncovering one of the big, heavy stones. He pried up the stone and dropped the two cards onto the soft loam. Then with both hands lay the stone back down, covering it with snow once more.

"Hey!" a gruff voice shouted from the doorway. Yazoo turned around in time for a security guard to grab his wrist. "Everyone is going to the dock."

"I'm coming," Yazoo said as the guard dragged him towards the door.

"There you are, pet," Faremis said as Yazoo was dragged inside. "Come on, come on, we need to leave." He took Yazoo's hand. A wave of revulsion passed through Yazoo.

"Wait!" he cried. "My ring. My engagement ring! I left it, in my jewelry box."

"We don't have time," Hojo snapped. "Down to the dock, now!"

"Please," Yazoo said. "Please, let me get it!" Faremis face trembled. He wanted to believe; desperately, his lust and adoration wanted to believe. Yazoo touched his face. "Please."

"Fine," he said at last. "Go fast, go go."

Yazoo ran.

In his room, he found the jewelry box with the ring, that hateful little diamond, in the otherwise empty box. Turning the hard edge of the diamond on the mirror, he drew little waves and the words 'help.'

He slipped the ring on, and ran back to Faremis.

In a smugglers cave at the base of the crater's southern side, the boats were waiting. An enormous ship, a white steamship wreathed in lights, could be seen through the mouth of the cave, floating on the horizon. Faremis took his hand and helped him into the little boat.

"That ship you see out there, that is where we're going. They'll never find us there," he said. "It's a party ship, would you believe it? Hojo has set up all the equipment in a portioned off section of the hold. They will never find us there, and certainly not before we can find a more permanent hiding place." He took one of Yazoo's hands in both of his. "We'll be all right. We'll be all right."

Yazoo pressed down on Faremis hand, digging the ring into the soft flesh of the doctor's palm.


	24. Investigation

**Disclaimer: I own nothing. Death Note and Final Fantasy are property of their respective owners.**

In the early morning hours, when the twilight was still thick with stars, the Turks swept into compound. Black helicopters rattled the still morning; heavy reinforced mobile tactical assault vehicles (Shinra's M-TAVs) sailed over the snowdrifts, surrounding what remained of Faremis Gast's laboratories.

A fire had swept through the buildings. The black, heat-shrunken remains of the laboratory, dusted in snow, lay scattered along the cliffside. The Turks, followed by Shinra elites, made a first, semi-coordinated thrust into the smoking ruins, searching for survivors. After that they withdrew, and a more precise recovery effort began. They grided out the sections of the lab and took them one at a time, armed with evidence collection bags, high-risk containment units for anything suspected of having Jenova in it, and radiation scanners that charted the levels of toxic chemical and radioactive residue in the air.

Light had, like the others, been outfitted with every technological toy that Shinra had developed for its police force before Midgar descended into its period of post-meteor anarchy. He used each of them accordingly; but his best tools were his eyes, and a power of observation that had germinated in his ingenious brain, brought to fruition by L.

The investigation of the ruins sent glimpses of memory through his mind.

_Darksoft hair against his shoulder;_ _fine marbling of scars on his body; he will see me hang; the mystery of your name._

He began picking his way through the wreckage. The specter _(the darksoft-hanging-name) _remained in him as he worked. The snow had made the ash soggy and cold, then frozen it into hard gray blocks or tough skins of gray ice over the remaining artifacts.

In the unignited incinerator vats, Elena made a grim discovery. The bodies of sixteen men, dead for varying periods of time, had been dumped there, waiting to be burned. Autopsies conducted at the scene on a sampling of the bodies brought back the same cause of death: heart attacks.

At this point, a picture began to emerge in Light's head of the kind of place that the three had been kept imprisoned. The guards that Faremis Gast used to protect his research weren't taken from Shinra soldier corps. They were criminals, skimmed from the prisons of Midgar. The incinerator vats were filled with Kira's victims.

At the end of a hallway, its interior blasted with chemically enriched and heated flames, Light found two adjacent rooms. The first one gave the impression not that it had been thoroughly cleaned out, but that nothing much of interest had ever accumulated within it. A shelf of books had been totally destroyed, save for two that had been shielded from the flames by being buried under the rubble when the shelf collapsed. Both were books of poetry, burdened by excessive rhyme and rhetoric and weighted down with Petrarcan sentiments. Light read a few lines before he bagged them, and judged them to be old-fashioned, and not a little infected with neo-romantic tragedy.

By evening, floodlights morphed the fire-damaged laboratory into the macabre splendor of gothic ruins. The winter night whirled around them, the wind blowing directly down from the snow-covered peaks and high shelves of the cliffs. Light searched, grided, flagged, and catalogued everything he found in the personal rooms that had belonged to Faremis (Ferrimas?) Gast, Jan Berninghausen, and Alain, whose last name he did not know. In the process, he had made every attempt to understand them.

He had seen L do it almost without effort. He could dive into the minds of criminals. He could navigate them: they were porous, informational entities to him.

Light did not have this ability, not intrinsically. It took effort, the great, unempathic effort of genius for him to do so, and he always kept himself at a safe, conceptualizing distance. L was not afraid to feel sympathy for those he chased; Light felt none, and would never extend any emotion to a criminal.

A slightly more objective person might have recognized in this failure to sympathize a deeply rooted sense that to sympathize with a criminal might have been to recognize them in himself—something that could never have happened to L.

But the effort of genius was not unrewarded, and Light had results—though they were never quite as full, never quite as rich with insight as L's. By chance, Light searched the tiny box that had once belonged to Yazoo. He found the charred jewelry box, and the scarred mirror within it.

Bagging the box, he removed the glass, holding it in black-skinned gloved hands, looking at the waves and the broken message: 'help.'

The evidence gathered in his mind, a constellation held together by the gravity of lust, hatred, and power. He saw—at a distance, always at a distance, for to get too close to the burning obsession of Faremis Gast would have had to recognize the luminous giant of his own obsession with L—he began to understand Faremis' ardor and his lust.

Yazoo was the most beautiful achievement.


	25. Investigation 2

**Disclaimer: I own nothing. Death Note and Final Fantasy are property of their respective owners.**

He saw the way Yazoo's life would have unfolded. He had been created in a place that, down to its very elements, had nothing beautiful. The books of poetry, the press-board jewelry box empty and starving for jewelry, the polyester, fraying, bordello-red curtains that could have been taken from any of the cheapest rooms at the Honey Bee; all attested to Gast's need for beauty, and a sense of beauty that was almost completed dominated by lust and by an archaic, mawkish romanticism.

The jewelry and curtains, these trinkets approximated the dull scripts dictated by the poems where gardens, jewels, and adulterous nymphs populated the pages.

When he looked around now, he could see every attempt Gast had made to recreate his poems. There were prints that had been hung on the wall; one which had survived showed that the picture it had held was taken from a calendar of great works of art. Nude statues had been discretely set on the endtables in Gast's bedroom.

Outside, the snowy, rocky ground showed that some attempt had been made to turn it into a garden. _Yazoo would have spent time there,_ Light thought. _The nymph would have needed a garden._

He walked around the courtyard. Yazoo had left a cry for help, fittingly slashed onto a mirror that would have daily shown him the hatefully beautiful face. If he had left anything else it would be here, in the place he had been most comfortable, a place that had probably been made for him.

He walked widdershins around the courtyard, even stumbling across the statue of a naked cherub, one that the guards of the compound had mercifully let decay. There were several sets of tracks. Two of them Light immediately recognized as belonging to Rude and Reno. The others did not belong to them. Light followed them from their origin, at the rear entrance to the compound. Small, light tracks (_long strides; he came out running)_ went to the center of the courtyard. They were followed by a larger, heavier set of tracks, imprinted deeper in the snow.

Both sets of tracks terminated at a pathway that had been cleared of snow, paved with large granite blocks.

_He walked here. Maybe they did together. _

Light followed the course of the path, charting their movements in his mind. He went back to the disturbance by the path, sitting back on his heels and looking carefully, until he noticed a few black grains of dirt flecks on the snow. He touched the rock, and felt how loosely it lay in its bed. Hands gloved, he pried it up.

The digital cards lay beneath, impressed in the earth, safe beneath the hard shell of the stone.

Light brought them back to the Turks immediately. In the next hour, the disks and all the other high priority evidence were flown back to Shinra's headquarters.

Ultimately, it was Reno and Light who were given the go-ahead to analyze the evidence. The dearth of lab technicians meant they ran most of the tests themselves. For all their difficulty, the results were not unrewarding. They gathered dozens of sets of prints—a particularly nice one from off the mirror glass that was matched to Yazoo—and they began the process of decoding the data encrypted on the tapes.

After that, they scoured the grid, searching for power drains.

Then, at 4 AM, Light made a connection. With no success in finding any direct power drains, he went back to the evidence. Gazing down at the mirror glass, for the first time it occurred to him that the waves might not be power lines—and a suggestion that they look for a power drain—no, the waves were waves.

Water.

On this hunch, Light searched the power grid centered on the underwater mako reactor. There he found something curious. A series of power drains, moving from grid block to grid block. When he plotted out the point of each distinct drain, and drew a line connecting them, the arc across the water that he formed lay directly over one of the major cruising routes.

A ship. They had to be on a ship. There was no other solution.

"It was ingenious," he would later tell Reno. "The ship moved from grid block to grid block, and so it never created a serious, pointed drain in any one location. It looked like a series of anomalies, nothing else. I wouldn't have figured it out if it weren't for the mirror glass."

Thus far, everything had gone according to Light's plans. However, two unexpected things were to happen which would turn out to be of the gravest importance. The first happened the next day. The wreckage of a small transport vessel, of the kind used to dock with larger vessels, washed ashore. Still bound up with the wreckage was a containment unit that had shattered, its captive escaping into the sea. All hands were presumed dead. It was, however, to become much stranger.

Only one body was found with the ship; a man, tangled in the ropes still lashed to the prow of the ship. An autopsy revealed that he was dead before he went into the water. The cause of death was a heart attack.

When Light asked Ryuk about this development, the shinigami 'hyuk-hyuked' and did something he was fond of doing; he misquoted Shakespeare.

"'There are more things in heaven and on earth, Polonius, than are dreamt of in your philosophies,'" he said, bobbing in the air.

Light ignored him for the rest of the evening, and spent it instead diving into the net, looking for the ship that held the captive children.


	26. He will die in the sea'

**Disclaimer: I own nothing. Death Note and Final Fantasy are property of their respective owners.**

**A/N: ** **C'mon, you know you want to review it! I haven't gotten a single one yet.**

"What do you mean, the ship sank?" Faremis asked. "You mean he's gone? You're experiment, your 'greatest project since Sephiroth' has gone into the sea?"

"That," Hojo said, "is precisely what I'm telling you. The runner that was carrying the containment unit sank. My discovery has escaped."

"How much of a threat does it pose?" Faremis Gast stood a little behind his colleague, who gazed out over the railing of the ship at the grey, wintry sea.

"That depends," Hojo said. "He poses far less of a threat than Sephiroth. The power in my discovery is immense, mind you, but it's housed in a man who is generally a gentle, timid personality. Generally. He had been a little manic of late, but perhaps that comes as a consequence of years of passive destruction."

"Passive destruction?"

"Yes, yes, look it's very complicated, I don't feel like going into it right now," Hojo said. "Suffice it to say that I don't think we shall see any widescale destruction. He certainly will not come after us."

"What happened to damage the containment unit?" Faremis asked.

"He did," Hojo said. "I told you, Faremis, in that man is the concentrated energy of destruction. I didn't realize—although I should have—that he would have to be moved periodically because any containment unit that was exposed to his energy would begin to corrode and decay rapidly." Faremis eyes widened almost imperceptibly.

"He…he's that powerful?"

"Yes," Hojo said. "Well, when all his energy is concentrated. I had him unconscious, which meant his power accumulated, it wasn't being put to use and distributed by consciousness." He glanced up at Faremis. "Look in the mirror."

Faremis turned around, to the floor length mirror in his suite, and his mouth opened. There on his temples, a silvering of gray had appeared where before had been nothing but chestnut brown hair—a feature he was very proud of.

"The concentrated energy of destruction," Hojo said behind him. "Even we have begun to decay just from our brief exposure to him. For my part, I have been forgetting things lately. The rotting in me has begun in my memory, perhaps early dementia, who knows?" Faremis was still stroking the silver at his temples.

"He—he aged me?"

"Yes, Faremis," Hojo said. And then, with a mild sneer, "You can cover it up with hair dye." Faremis mouth trembled with anger. Hojo, pleased, looked back out over the water.

"He will have died in the sea," Faremis said. "It's too cold to live long there."

"He won't die. He cannot die. He is immortal, don't you see? The man in that containment unit, he housed the pure energy of destruction. That energy is immortal…at least, insofar as we comprehend something like immortality. No, he won't die. He will wash ashore, and he will collect himself, and try to understand how he ended up so far from home, where he is, who he is, what he is. I shall probably see him again, but I cannot afford to seek him out just now." He glanced at Faremis, who had lost interest in reflection, He was looking towards the bedroom door of their suite, shut tight against the cold that came in from the open balcony.

Yazoo was in there.


	27. How loyal are you'

**Disclaimer: I own nothing. Death Note and Final Fantasy are property of their respective owners.**

"What time is dinner?" Faremis asked, looking at the door shut tight against the winter air.

"Half past I-don't-care," Hojo said. "I'm not going. I'll eat in the cabin."

"I was thinking about taking Yazoo," Faremis said. His brows furrowed in concern and humiliated adoration. "I…I'd love to take him to dinner. This is so much like the life I wanted for us, Hojo. He and I, a formal dinner every night, music, dancing, of cloudless climes and starry skies—"

At this point, Hojo had already decided he would go to dinner—Faremis was a ridiculous man, and Hojo delighted in watching him make a poetic fool of himself. He watched Faremis stand in front of the door, knocking and speaking softly through the wood until he was permitted entry.

Faremis went inside.

After that, Hojo snuck up to the door, listening. He heard the squeak of the bedsprings under Faremis weight, and a few heated whispers. Then came the warm, fumbling grunts and a louder, more heated groan from Faremis. Hojo drew his ear away.

He went back to the balcony and leaned on the railing, frowning, until Jan Berninghausen—Faremis longtime assistant—knocked on the door to the suite.

"Is the Doctor here?" Jan asked.

"No, he's indisposed," Hojo said, glancing towards the bedroom door meaningfully. "You can wait for him if you like. He's in the bedroom." Jan, a slender, red-haired young man with the cruel smile of bully, said,

"Then I'm sure he won't be long."

Dr. Hojo saw his opportunity.

He made two whiskeys and invited Berninghausen onto the balcony with him. They stood looking out over the water, talking about the experiments, about Sephiroth, and then Hojo poured again and invited Jan to talk about his own experiments, certain that the young assistant would relish the chance to expound upon his own brilliance to Shinra's most senior and respected, if hated, scientist. A third pour of whiskey, and Hojo said,

"Faremis made himself a beauty."

"Yazoo? Oh yeah, God Yazoo's amazing. Legs up to his neck, body of a model. Double-jointed too. And the hair, dear f*cking God, the hair."

"Not exactly subtle," Hojo smiled. Jan laughed.

"What, you mean the porn-star lips and lidded eyes? Yeah, Faremis didn't exactly opt for discretion with some of those add-ons."

A sense of beauty informed by lust never conceals itself.

Hojo said,

"What is his secret?"

"Hm?" Jan thought too late to feign innocence. Hojo saw it, and said,

"Berninghausen, please don't tell me you think I am stupid," Hojo downed his whiskey, and said, "That wild whirlwind, that fanged medusa queen I saw on the tapes attacking Edge City? With Faremis?"

"Captivity and Stockholm syndrome, being what they are…" Berninghausen trailed off, but his gaze lingered on the door, reflected in the open glass doors of the balcony.

"The funny thing about Shinra," Hojo said. "Is that they never seem to change how they do things. A few things change here and there, but nothing ever really changes, not in the nature of the beast. Years ago, Faremis discovered Jenova; after that, they gave full control of all his projects to me. And when he married Ifalna—that went to me as well. The woman and the girl were both in my possession for seven years. I watched his daughter grow up and his wife, with some tenderness and lies, laid as mine." He let this information sink into Jan Berninghausen, watching. Jan's eyes flit back to the bedroom door. "So I'm always very supportive of Faremis projects," Hojo said. "I consider it an investment in my own future happiness because what is his always, eventually, becomes what is mine." He turned, facing Jan, and said with a smile, "How loyal are you to Faremis?"


	28. He's conditioned'

**Disclaimer: I own nothing. Death Note and Final Fantasy are property of their respective owners.**

**A/N: ** **C'mon, you know you want to review it! I haven't gotten a single one yet.**

"I'm loyal to my research," Jan said, "and to the advance of science."

"Good answer," Hojo said, "since I am a far better scientist than Faremis, and far more generous with my research." He nodded towards the closed door. "Tell me, Jan, how does he do it?" This time, there was only a brief flicker of doubt in Jan's face. Then,

"He's conditioned him."

"Conditioned?"

"Yes," Jan said. "Conditioned. In the early part of the Jenova experiments, Dr. Hollander conditioned—"

"The soldiers he experimented on with special trigger phrases, yes. Urges were implanted deeply in their subconscious. These urges could be brought to the surface by using a trigger phrase. Hollander conditioned his soldiers to become insensibly gripped by the urge to commit suicide when they heard the phrase: Alpha Dolphin Relay. A good choice, since there was no chance of the phrase being easily discovered. It was quite effective. I saw him test it on a few young, healthy, happy men, who killed themselves without delay as soon as the phrase was uttered."

"Its similar to that, Doctor," Jan said. "The trigger phrase causes Yazoo to become hyper-sexual. He will absolutely need to have sex with the person who delivers the phrase. He won't be able to relax, and he'll suffer physical pain until he does." Hojo's eyes widened with delight.

"Do go on, Dr. Berninghausen ," Hojo said. "Please call me Hojo—I consider us friends."

"He—Yazoo—will not be able to climax once the phrase is delivered, unless Gast gives him the climax trigger," Jan smiled, his tongue pressed against his teeth.

"And how do you know this?"

Jan smiled; he was chuffed with his own cleverness.

"Yazoo confided in me—a little. But Faremis is not very subtle. The phrases aren't very subtle. They're phrases that can be slipped into everyday conversation."

"I see, I see," Hojo said. "If we're going to have to brain wash our teenage lover into wanting to screw, we mustn't have to spoil the mood—however tense and awkward it may be."

"He doesn't want to seem like he's making him, like Yazoo is conditioned."

"I understand completely, he wants to live a fantasy," Hojo turned to the door, smiling. "Do you know any of the phrases?"

"I was only ever able to figure out one," Jan said. "Yazoo can do amazing things with his mouth."

"I don't doubt it," Hojo said. He turned to Jan, the smile now mingled with white teeth. "Berninghausen, did you not feel guilty? I mean, Yazoo can't be any older than eighteen; wasn't there a twinge of anxious self-reproach on your part?" Jan raised his eyebrows.

"Sir?" he asked, than laughed a little. "Sir, he's a clone. He's just a clone. Why would I—"

"No reason whatsoever," Hojo said. He raised his glass. "Berninghausen, Faremis has run his lot with these clones into the ground. I think it is time that this project matured. I will of course retain you and Alain. Alain specializes in Kadaj, yes?"

"Yes."

"Good," Hojo said. "Let us watch him tonight. Let the student become the studied, let the experiment become the specimen! We shall study him tonight, and every night, until we know what we need to know, until he delivers the phrases and kicks Yazoo's sexual need to its unnatural pitch. When we know the phrase, and the key to all that delight is in our hands, Faremis shall take an early retirement—straight into the sea. Then we will make this project what it should be," his voice dropped, his dark eyes fixed on the closed door, "and we shall learn Yazoo's trigger phrases and thus we shall be entertained in the process. Will this work well for you, Berninghausen."

"I've always admired you, sir."

"Excellent," Hojo said. "Then hold onto our little dream in the secret places of your heart. In a few nights, I'm sure it won't be many, the key to paradise will be carelessly thrown into our hands."

Outside, the light of the setting sun gleamed on the water.


	29. Wu Tai

**Disclaimer: I own nothing. Death Note and Final Fantasy are property of their respective owners.  
**

**A/N: C'mon, you know you're just dying to write a review. Go ahead, do it. By the way, does anyone want to see Yazoo x Light? Let me know if you like the idea… **

Wu-Tai.

Across the great waters of the planet lies the dark nation. High mountains ring the widest part of the island, sheltering sandy inlets and inland bays at rivermouths. Thick forests extend for hundreds of miles; soaring cliffs and deep valleys conceal small villages and mountain roads winding along steep ledges and through sunshot forest canopies. Golden pagodas, the temples of gods older than Midgar, older than the forests and the mountains, older, even, than the great waters, rise into the mists that comes like a ghost from the mountains.

Teru Mikami, carrying everything he owned on his back, traveled in a band of men and women. They too carried everything they owned on their backs. They were refugees from Midgar, most of them of Wu-Taian parentage. They had fled Midgar after meteor; most of them spoke fluent wu-taian, and most of them hoped to escape Shinra's tyranny here, in the place that had resisted it the longest.

The dark nation had fought a war to retain its independence. It had been called the dark nation because it resisted Shinra—it refused the reactors that would bring electric powered lights. In response, Shinra had waged a brutal campaign against the small nation. It had been thoroughly beat back, until it had dispatched Sephiroth Crescent and Genesis Rhapsodos. With their battalions of soldiers, Wu-Tai had been defeated.

Wu-Tai had been a testing ground for Shinra's great weapons, and those who had lived through the war knew that Shinra had ignored or deliberately misinterpreted requests for peaceful surrenders in the name of testing out the efficacy of its creations.

Wu-Tai, still scarred in some places, had healed its wounds better than Midgar. It had no megalopolis, no titanic city to cripple: it had villages, shrines, and misty watersheds of the forest, still alive with ancient power and with the undefeated spirit of ancient gods.


	30. Alone

**Disclaimer: I own nothing. Death Note and Final Fantasy are property of their respective owners.  
**

**A/N: C'mon, you know you're just dying to write a review. Go ahead, do it. By the way, does anyone want to see Yazoo x Light? Let me know if you like the idea… **

Teru Mikami spoke very little. He had no companions. People were kind to him nevertheless and he, in return, helped where he could. He carried firewood for campfires and he helped carry water buckets from the rivers. Children avoided him, but animals did not. A few of the men showed a disproportionate dislike of him. One or two women gossiped about his good looks. Most of the time, no one took much notice of him, except for now and again, he seemed to whisper to them, to haunt their peripheral vision, or to be just on the edge of conscious thought and consideration, as though he were something that they could not quite escape—even if they could never identify anything strange about him.

The small band of refugees halted by the riverside at nightfall. Teru sat beside a campfire composed mostly of other lonely travelers, men without families, and a few quiet widows. They talked quietly, roasting fresh caught fish over the flames; they ate slowly, flicking sticky scales from their fingertips and picking bones from their teeth. Most went to sleep early, children wrapped in blankets and put to sleep in handcarts or in delivery barrows modified to hold them. Most of the travelers fell into dead sleep; they had traveled on foot all day, eaten little, and the way before them was long.

Teru alone stayed awake.

He had no idea where he was. He knew who he was, but the life he remembered made no sense. It featured people and places that did not exist. It showed dazzling cities where there were none; it had a life and a history that the eons and the energy of Midgar did not grasp. He knew in a profound intuition that he had been violently thrust from his world, had known it ever since he had awakened on the beaches of Junon, exhausted, dehydrated, naked as a child thrust from the waters, The sudden, cosmic distance between him and his world resonated within him. His being, down to the vibration of molecules that held him together, was different; he harmonized with a different rhythm than the one pulsing through the lifestream of Midgar.

He lay awake, alone. He tried again to remember what had happened. He went over the events in his head.

He'd had a broken wrist.

He'd broken it practicing a kata and he'd gone to the emergency room to fix it.

A doctor had seen him, a doctor with a ponytail and steel-rimmed glasses.

His next memory was the icy cold water, the shock to his heart and lungs; then the rough, dry sands of the beaches.

He sat up as noises from the forest began to imitate familiar sounds: breaking branches became footsteps; the wind became the omnipresent roar of traffic in Tokyo; the stars imitated with great irreverence the lights of the city. He brushed his hair back and rose, unable to lie still. The sounds like footsteps seemed to retreat, but he ignored that as fantasy.

He went to the river, clear and white-lacquered with moonlight. The silvered trees hung low, dipping their branches into the water. Carp and koi fish broke the surface in gray flashes. The footsteps paralleled him, walking on the other side of the river.

Yet no one was there. The wind snapped the branches. A few large raindrops, the progenitors of a storm building out over the sea, clattered onto the water, disturbing the order of the stream.

No one. He was alone.


	31. The Temple

**Disclaimer: I own nothing. Death Note and Final Fantasy are property of their respective owners.  
**

**A/N: C'mon, you know you're just dying to write a review. Go ahead, do it. By the way, does anyone want to see Yazoo x Light? Let me know if you like the idea… **

In silence Teru sat by the water. Perhaps some of the men who showed an inordinate dislike of him had perceived that no flesh and blood human could sit in such profound, terrible silence.

Presently, the footsteps seemed to return. They moved back into the forest, following the course of the river. Teru stood up. He was certain he heard them. Experience told him it was nothing, that his mind was playing tricks on him.

One, two, one, two; weight and rhythm even. He was certain they were footsteps. Part of his confused mind began to wonder: was it possible that there had been footsteps every night? Was it possible that he had convinced himself _not_ to hear something that had been there all a long? Had he talked himself out of reality, because it seemed like it could not be true?

He stepped into the shallowest part of the river, marked by large rocks, and went across.

He followed the moonlit band of the river, the splashing koi leaping up, the trees bowing dripping hair before him. He followed the river upstream, stopping occasionally when the footsteps walking along the other side of the bank were drowned out by the sounds of the forest, beginning again when they seemed to resume.

They were leading him.

He followed.

The forest ended at the sheer wall of a cliff. The veiling mists surrounded an ancient pagoda carved into the mountainside. A waterfall ran parallel to a great stone courtyard, separating the chatter of the forest and the dusty road from the eternal stone edifice. The moon was closer here; from the top of the tower, Teru could breathe in its light.

Above the great pavilions, a cloudlike stream of light flowed across the sky.

The Lifestream.

And there, standing beneath it, was a man.


	32. Sephiroth

**Disclaimer: I own nothing. Death Note and Final Fantasy are property of their respective owners.  
**

**A/N: C'mon, you know you're just dying to write a review. Go ahead, do it. By the way, does anyone want to see Yazoo x Light? Let me know if you like the idea… **

The man stood in the center of the temple. He wore the clothing of a Wu-Tai warrior, a tunic and loose trousers of linen, belted with a white sash. His height was majestic, the features aloof and proud, but for the moment softened with curiosity. What Teru took at first to be a silver outer robe was his long, loose flowing hair.

He stepped towards Teru, and uttered the bewildering words,

"You are like me." His voice was a soft tenor, tranquil with the mystery of the eternal place.

"I," Teru said, "am fairly certain I am not."

"Yes, you are like me." The man came closer, his hair whispering in the wind. "You are like me." He stood before Teru, within arm's reach.

And then there came to Teru something that could only be described as the letting go. It came because of the other man, because standing so close to him the energy of each man's spirit recognized its like. A miserable, oppressive unease broke apart into calm.

"I think, maybe, I am like you," he said. He felt terribly alone even saying it.

"There is probably very little sense in you continuing to travel with them," he said.

"Why?"

"They have no elderly with them. Anymore," the man said, and looked meaningfully at Teru.

"I know," Teru said. "But that isn't my doing." The man looked patiently at him.

"And the sick have all been left to rest by the roadside. And the children do not go near you, and only the dogs keep your company."

"I don't understand," Teru said. "You have been watching me? Why?"

"It may take some time for you to understand," the man said. "I knew that you were like me."

"Who are you?" Teru asked. His dark hair, longer now since his arrival in Wu Tai, came loose and fell slick along his face. His dark eyes gleamed red.

"My name is written in what has fallen from the life tree," the Silver-Haired man said. "It cannot be spoken." His steel-hard gaze became even softer. "I tried to explain that to the first human that I ever encountered. She asked me my name. I could tell her only of the language in which it was written, but she misunderstood and took that to be my name; she called me Sephiroth, and that is the name I have kept."

"Mikami Teru," Teru said, nodding in respect. Sephiroth nodded in return.

"You should probably not travel among them anymore," Sephiroth said. "You are not like them. You are like me. And we are better left to ourselves, in the places like this."

"You live here?"

"Yes."

"How do you eat? Where do you sleep?"

"I have only ever done those things by convention, not by need. You will find the same is true for you. We do not need rest or nourishment."

"_I_ do."

"You only _believe_ you do," Sephiroth said. He smiled. "Stay for a while here, and see. Then you will understand. If I turn out to be wrong, you may rejoin the band when they cross the southern steppes." Without saying anymore, he turned and walked back into the great, empty temple.

After a moment Teru followed him into the shadows.


	33. Dinner in First Class

**Disclaimer: I own nothing. Death Note and Final Fantasy are property of their respective owners.  
**

**A/N: C'mon, you know you're just dying to write a review. Go ahead, do it. By the way, does anyone want to see Yazoo x Light? Let me know if you like the idea… **

The uncherished looking glass of stateroom 6 was pulled forward and dusted off thoroughly, until it was fit to bear the image of the sun-blond Light Yagami. Honeyed amber eyes beguiled the poor glass; a warmly upswept mouth, invitingly slick and deeply sensuous, and a radiant array of laughter completed the vision that bewitched the mirror. Light Yagami practiced his appearance, making himself conscious of what each angle, each smile, each glance revealed.

It was a few minutes before dinner. He had just finished tying a black bow tie and combing his hair when the little gold clock on his mantle chimed the hour. Taking his black coat he walked down the stairs, to the first class dining room.

A chandelier dazzled the colonnaded gallery of the dining room. Young women in lavish evening gowns paraded down the stairs, attached to the arms of gentlemen in the tunic fashions of Archades or the kimono-style suits of Wu-Tai.

Light had worn Archadian style; and he was heartbreakingly handsome.

He waited by the bar until he saw them. A man, middle aged, holding the arm of a creature with long silver hair spilling into the seductive dip of his back. He waited until they were seated, then gave the head waiter a large bill to have his table reassigned to theirs. Money being scarce as it was, this was done without delay.

The silver-haired beauty's face was impassive. The more Faremis Gast, his companion, talked, the more glacial he became. Light followed them casually; and his eyes never left Yazoo.

"Here you are pet," Faremis pulled the chair out for him. Yazoo sat down, his low-backed dress tunic rustling when he moved. Light took the seat beside him. Yazoo didn't look up. He twirled a diamond ring on his finger, leaving a bright red ring of irritated skin.

"Good evening," Light said to Yazoo. Faremis looked up at him, smiled blithely. Another man, with thick glasses and a ponytail sitting down beside him also favored Light with a glance, then turned his attention to the wine list.

Yazoo said nothing.

Faremis nudged Yazoo's side.

"Say Hello, pet," he said. "We mustn't be cold just because we are so pretty." He lightly pinched Yazoo's chin, in a way that managed to be both patronizing and sleazy at the same time.

Yazoo, again, did nothing. Light's heart tightened. The passive beauty at the table looked nothing like the banshee that had torn through Edge city. With the intuition of those who know how to navigate the labyrinth of human emotion, Light took Yazoo's hand out of sight of Faremis. It was such a cold, lifeless little creature in his hand.

"That's a beautiful ring," he said. Yazoo finally looked up at him.

Light smiled in Yazoo's face; moment was like sunlight awakening the incandescent splendor of the snow.

"Diamonds," he said, "are the most beautiful of stone. You know, though, they're so pale and delicate that it always surprises me a little that they are the strongest of all the stones. If I remember correctly, they are even strong enough to cut glass."

Yazoo's eyes trembled beneath the opaque contact lenses made to hide his slit pupils. He pulled his hand away and laid it, trembling in his lap.

He said nothing for the duration of dinner.


	34. Hubris

**Disclaimer: I own nothing. Death Note and Final Fantasy are property of their respective owners.**

Late in the evening Light stood on the deck smoking a cigarette, watching the constellations dip burning into the sea.

A cold blade slid along his throat, warm with cigarette smoke.

"If you're from Shinra, I'll kill you right here."

Light turned around slowly. Yazoo stood in front of him, holding an ornamental knife like those hidden in ladies fans or in the sheaths of letter openers. It was sharpened to a razor edge. His quicksilver hair whipped on the wind, eyes silvery, gleaming reflective, like cat's eyes.

"I certainly didn't mean to upset you," Light held up his hands. "I'm sorry if I said something wrong." Yazoo's eyes widened. He lowered the knife.

"I thought…Oh, I—I'm sorry, Mr….?"

"Light."

"Mr. Light."

"No, no, just Light. Just Light."

"Light," Yazoo said. "I'm sorry, when you said—I thought you meant something that he didn't mean." He took the knife away, hiding it behind his back. "I'm sorry to disturb you." He turned, and Light grabbed his forearm gently.

"Wait, please, I'm sorry, I don't know your name."

Yazoo waited a moment under his hand.

"Lachesis," he said.

"Lachesis," Light said. "One of the fates."

"Yes," Yazoo faced him once more. The abandoned, miserable expression from before was surpassed by the still feral curiosity of a wild animal, long caged.

"That's a beautiful name," Light said.

"I like yours. Light," Yazoo said. "I like names like that. Cloud. Light. Squall. Lightning." Light offered Yazoo a cigarette; he waved it away.

"I hope I didn't offend you earlier, at the dinner table," Light said.

"No," Yazoo said softly. "My fiancée is…pleased when people notice me."

"He must be pleased all the time," Light smiled.

"Not really." His voice was soft and breathy.

"How long have you been engaged?" Light asked.

"It hasn't been long. A few months," he looked away, out towards the water. "We are going to get married when we arrive in Archades."

"Archades, wow." Light said. "You're leaving the country. That's a long trip. An extended Honeymoon?"

"Sort of."

"I'm disembarking in Midgar."

"Midgar?" Yazoo said. "What is there for you in Midgar?"

"Work," Light said. "I'm an NT."

"NT?"

"Net tech," Light said. "I work building and maintaining the network connections in Midgar. I'm building up the World Network that fell apart after meteor."

"I thought everyone abandoned Midgar?" Yazoo's pale, calm face did not change at all when he said this. Light said,

"Edge City wasn't a viable alternative. Rufus Shinra thought it would be more economical to build a new infrastructure, rather than attempt to rebuild the old one. That turned out not to be the case."

"So every migrated, then they re-migrated back to Midgar," Yazoo said. "Including you."

"Yes," Light said, exhaling smoke. "The city is broken. Its filthy, it's a mess of crime and violence, the air is never clean, there are long times of uncertainty between periods of hot running water, and I love it there."

"You do," Yazoo said.

"Yes," Light said. "There is a lot that is good there, and that should be defended." Yazoo smiled, a soft curl of lip over the hint of little white teeth.

"There is something wrong with you, if you love Midgar. Don't look at me like that, as if you're shocked. It's true. Do you know what Midgar is? It is hubris."


	35. Striving Towards the Good

**Disclaimer: I own nothing. Death Note and Final Fantasy are property of their respective owners.**

"Hubris," Light said.

"Yes. Hubris. That's my opinion."

"Your premise is flawed," Light needled, gently, wanting Yazoo to continue talking to him. Yazoo raised one silver eyebrow, thinly arched.

"Midgar," he said, "is human pride, the vanity of the human race. The Lifestream was supposed to be the energy of creation, don't you know that? The ancients revered it as the hand of the creator, pouring energy into the world. And in Midgar, it powered toasters and washing machines, and the neon signs that advertise pornographic theaters and run the vibrating needles of tattoo artists. Please don't mistake Midgar for anything but the ashes of human arrogance."

"Of course you are right."

"Then _how _is my premise flawed?"

"Because you are talking about the relation of man to the infinite forces of creation. But man to man, human being to human being, Midgar is still a place like any other. There are the guilty, and the innocent: there are good people, and bad people; and any time this relationship holds true, we are bound by the pure law to protect the lives of the innocent."

Yazoo's cheeks flushed red.

"And," he said, a little breathlessly, "I suppose that will be _you_?" A slight stress on the last syllable inflected it with a sneering disbelief, yet Yazoo remained as tranfixingly beautiful as before, more so for the light red flush on his cheeks. Honey-eyed Light looked into Yazoo's face, through the gray screen of the smoke.

"It will. I don't see any point to human life beyond the endeavor that we make to bring about the good. Haven't you ever asked yourself: what do we have outside of striving towards the good?"

"Idealists," Yazoo said flatly, "never last long in Midgar. You aren't the first one to go there, with his head high and his hands clean, and you won't be the last. You're going to get chewed up and spit out there."


	36. Insufferable Boy

**Disclaimer: I own nothing. Death Note and Final Fantasy are property of their respective owners.**

Light shrugged off Yazoo's barb.

"You aren't the first person to tell me that, and you probably won't be the last," he said. "Evil thrives on cynicism. Let Midgar try to humiliate me; let it try to chew me up and spit me out. I've learned the lesson of the ages."

"And what is the lesson of the ages?" Yazoo asked.

"That to be an idealist means to fix your eyes on the arc of a distant horizon, extending into the infinite, despite the excruciating, humiliating realization that you are looking up from the filthiest gutter."

A moment of silence passed between them. Then Yazoo dropped the large, beautiful green eyes towards the sea, brushed by the silver whips of his hair.

"You haven't lived in the gutter long enough. The filth hasn't seeped in yet; it needs time."

"I'll give it time," Light said. "It's from the gutter that the view of the infinite is the clearest."

"Do you always talk like this?"

"Only when I think someone will engage me on this level," Light said. "Most of the time I talk about politics, or finances, or new revolutions in Net Technology. But if someone shows an interest—"

"When did I show an interest in your idealism?" Yazoo laughed, a haughty, belittling laugh that underneath was flustered with uncertainty.

"When you showed me your cynicism," Light said. "You challenged me. I answered the challenge." Yazoo turned around, hair whipping, back swaying.

"You're insufferable," he said, lifting the delicate hem of his robes and walking across the sea-damp deck, towards the elevators. "I hope you know that you are insufferable."


	37. My Name is Yaya

**Disclaimer: I own nothing. Death Note and Final Fantasy are property of their respective owners.**

"Why," Light darted ahead of Yazoo, cutting off his retreat. "Why? Because I'm more challenged by your cynicism than by that little stinger you carry?"

"Stinger?" Yazoo half laughed, half cried. "You wouldn't be half as high-and-mighty if I'd held my gun to your head!"

"I've stared down worse weapons than a gun," Light said, his bowtie loose and whipping in the wind. "You should know death doesn't scare idealists. And what makes you think I would be afraid of any weapon you could point at me, if you are as cynical as you pretend to be? Cynics are past the point of caring, and you'd have to care an awful lot to kill me."

In the pool of light fallen from one of the wu-taian lanterns, delicate dress-robe held in little fingers, Yazoo looked up at Light, a mixture of infuriated patience and something else, something almost delight, on the somber, sephirian face.

"You are an insufferable boy," he said again.

"Have dinner with me tomorrow."

"Why would I want to have dinner with an insufferable boy?"

"Do you want me to convince you?"

"I want to see if you can," Yazoo said.

"One, You owe me for the un-called-for threat on my life," Light said. "Two, You must continue our conversation. Three, I have champagne in my stateroom and money to burn on more."

"Oh, champagne, _very_ idealistic."

"Nothing fuels idealism like wine," Light said. "Haven't you ever listened to La Boheme?"

"Puccini," Yazoo said, "yes, I have." He smiled, a smile that enlivened his jewel-eyes. "All right. Maybe. But if there is no champagne, I'm leaving."

Yazoo slipped past Light, silks hissing as he moved. He went to the lift; and when the doors open, spilling out the golden light of the ship, he looked over his shoulder and smiled.

"My name is Yaya," he said.

"Yaya," Light said. "Meet me here tomorrow?"

"Maybe," Yazoo called as the door closed, sealing him within.

Light went back to the railing. He felt flushed with success. He had made contact with Yazoo, one of Kadaj's gang. That meant he was close, close to catching Faremis (Ferrimas?) Gast, close to solving once and for all the mystery of their disappearance. It brought Midgar one step closer to ending the legacy of the Doctors of Death.

The issue of the clones themselves, that might be a point of contention between himself and the Turks.

He brushed that thought aside for the time being. The point now was to gain Yazoo's trust, to get him to take him into confidence and—the weighed heavily on Light's mind—to find the youngest clone, Kadaj. His intuition (and the evidence of his investigation thus far) indicated that the attack on Edge City lacked the genuine malice that Light sought to remove from the world. There was desperation in the attack, and an almost childlike insistence on reunion.

How much cognitive responsibility did the three bear for their actions?

How much of the responsibility belonged to Sephiroth, who had driven Kadaj to bring him back?

How much of the responsibility lay with Gast, who had trained them and kept them until that hour, and why, if not for his treatment, had they showed the suicidal rage that they showed?

Light continued to smoke, pondering these questions.


	38. Back Among Men

**Disclaimer: I own nothing. Death Note and Final Fantasy are property of their respective owners.**

**A/N: C'mon, review it already!**

**Son of A/N: This is one of my favorite chapters! **

**Son of the son of A/N: It's long but worth it! Love you Kefka! **

Sephiroth Crescent followed Teru Mikami through the forests of Wu-Tai, towards the southern steppes of the mountain range. They followed the snaking line of a pathway on the high ridge above the shining band of the river where the crowd of refugees traveled towards the southern portions of Wu-tai.

Teru had spent the night in the temple. By morning, he was resolved to meet up with the refugees again and Sephiroth agreed to show him the way. On the way, Sephiroth introduced himself further. He explained that he was a soldier, that he had fought in the Wu-Tai war, and that he had come to live here after because, despite the nature of his time spent in Wu-Tai, Wu-Tai was the place he had always thought was most beautiful.

"I was a prosecutor, I think," Teru said. "I believed I was…but the life I remember doesn't make any sense. I find myself here, in Misgar, and everything here is clearly vivid and real. Midgar is not a dream, I can see that. But my other life has the same clarity and distinctness. They are both real, but they don't agree."

"And the truth cannot admit a material contradiction," Sephiroth said. "So one of your lives must be false. Or perhaps you are remembering a past incarnation?"

"I hadn't thought of that," Teru said. Sephiroth shaded his eyes, looking down towards the river.

"There," he said. "You can just see the movement of the refugees among the trees."

"Are you sure you wouldn't like to come with us?" Teru offered. "This place is lonely, and I know they'd welcome you."

"My appearance is very well known," Sephiroth said. "They would run in terror from me. No, I'm afraid I cannot stay with you all the way into the south. I would be recognized as soon as we reached any village. But I will stay with you a while. As far as the last ridge. It has been so long since I spoke to someone like me."

"What do you mean, 'like you?'" Teru asked, as they began to make their way down the ridge at an angle, so as to meet up with the travelers at the next juncture of the river. "I am not a soldier. I've never been in the army. I'm a swordsman, but it's a popular sport in Japan."

"Japan?" Sephiroth asked with mild curiosity. "Is that a village?"

"No," Teru said. "It is…was…it _might be_ an island nation, like Wu-Tai." Sephiroth laughed softly.

"And this is the place that does not exist here, the place you think you are from?"

"That's right," Teru said, skidding and sending a shower of rocks down the cliffside as he began his descent. Sephiroth followed, and with practiced grace descended the cliff. He had braided his long silver hair, tucking it up into the hood of a linen parka. A mountain storm had gathered during the night, and both he and Teru wore extra clothing to fend off the rain. Gray strands of hair slipped free of Sephiroth's hood; silver, like the storm.

They reached the juncture of the river with the sloping ridge, where the road curved around the broad loop of the riverbend. They took shelter from the rain under the thick canopy of trees, by the water leaping and dancing with raindrops. When the band of people came into view, Teru got up, prepared to greet them. One of the men at the head of the group greeted him with a bow, smiling.

"We thought we had lost you, Mikami-san," he said.

"I got myself lost," Teru said, "but I found my way out again. I've brought someone—"

But where he turned to introduce him, Sephiroth had already vanished.

By nightfall, they stopped in the burned out ruins of a Wu-Taian monastery. Moss lay thick upon the walkways and in the dark halls, still ringing with forgotten prayers. The fireblack stones were cooled by rainwater, wrapped with green, silken vines; and above, the stars sang.


	39. Death Among the Refugees

**Disclaimer: I own nothing. Death Note and Final Fantasy are the property of their respective owners.**

**A/N: One day, with the gods as my witnesses, I will get a review!**

Sephiroth, disguising himself, joined Teru by one of the small fires, occupied mostly by bachelors, widowers, and a few young women curious about the tall, handsome strangers who had come into the group.

It was midnight when Teru got up from the fire, leaving a half-eaten bowl of boiled rice, and made his way a little down the garden path of the monastery to the koi pond, now a haven for frogs. He stood just out of reach of the firelight, in the shadow of a broken pillar. Sephiroth stood behind him.

A family was camped by the frog pond. An old man, the grandfather, was laid in a wheelbarrow pushed by his son-in-law. His daughter sat by the fire, her two children playing beside her.

"What is it?" Sephiroth whispered.

"The old man, the grandfather, he is going to die tonight," Teru said.

"To die? How do you know?"

"I can see when people are going to die. Names. Dates of death, I see above the heads of men the hour, their hour," he leaned against the column, watching as the daughter poured tea for her father from a little metal pot. "I saw him earlier today. Tonight he is going to die, and I wanted to make sure he was not alone. They are a nice family."

"Extraordinary," Sephiroth said. "You know when men are appointed to die?"

"Yes," Teru said.

One of the little girls had run up the garden path, chasing one of the luminous night-moths of Wu-Tai island. Teru watched her, smiling, then sat back on his heels, beckoned her over.

"Shojo-chan," he said, "come over." She approached, without fear this close to her parents. "Shojo-chan, what is your name?"

"Kanako," she answered. Her round face was still baby-fat, her two black pigtail braids tied with graying pink ribbons, the last remaining scraps of a mother's evening gown, or a grandmother's silk handkerchief. She was no more than four years old.

"Kanako-chan," Teru said. "I heard your ototosan say today that he was happy to spend his time with you. I think he'd like to talk to you and your sister tonight."

"You heard him say that?" At four, she was delighted by the idea that she had been talked about by her grandfather.

"Yes," Teru said and before he could say anything else, she had run back down the path to her grandfather. Teru rose once more and led the way back to the campfire.

"How long have you had this talent?" Sephiroth asked when they were seated by the smoldering remains of the fire, after the rest of their group had retired, exhausted, to their damp bedding.

"A few years," Teru said. "It is not mine, though. The power is borrowed from another."

"Who?"

"A young man," Teru said, "of great vision."

"What is his name?"

"I cannot say," Teru said, shaking his head. "It is not important anyway. He is gone. He belongs to that other place."

"Then maybe he is not real?"

"Maybe," Teru said. "But no, he must be real. He must be. The whole meaning of my life only makes sense if he is real, it is only coherent if he exists."

"Then he must be real," Sephiroth nodded. "As Geni was real." Teru raised his eyes—oh the darkness there, the infinite lightless depths, one wonders why Light was never afraid—and smiled at Sephiroth.

"Who was Geni?" he asked. Sephiroth, the empyrean giant of Midgar, who had held the life of the planet in his cosmic majesty, said with the softness of a raindrop.

"Geni…Geni was my gravity."

At that moment a cry went up from the frog pond, for the old man had died in his sleep.


	40. Genesis

**Disclaimer: I own nothing. Death Note and Final Fantasy are the property of their respective owners.**

**A/N: One day, with the gods as my witnesses, I will get a review!**

The next morning, the old man was laid to rest in the inner garden of the monastery.

Sephiroth and Teru attended the unceremonious erecting of the gravesite, thinking quietly to himself. After the family had packed up their things, when the group was once again gathered on the road and ready to depart, Sephiroth went to the koi pond. From the pond he drew a small, black stone, smoothed by the water to an obsidian shine.

He placed the stone in the pocket of his linen parka and found Teru on the road. They departed early, to make the most of the day.

That day, as he and Teru walked by the riverside, Sephiroth told him about Genesis; about the young soldier, proud, strong, with too much wit and sarcasm to stay out of trouble, and too much intelligence and cleverness to stay in trouble for long. And Teru began to talk about Light and about the death note.

"Did you love him?" Sephiroth asked that evening, as they sat by the fire.

"As I loved the law," Teru said.

"Then it is not the same," Sephiroth said. "Geni was my love, the love of my life." He looked up, towards the sky.

"Reiji," Teru said after a long hour of silence had passed.

"Reiji?"

"Namikawa," Teru said. "I think…it is not quite the same. We never had a chance, Reiji and I, but the feeling was there, for me. I was in love with him, like a schoolboy."

"Hm," Sephiroth smiled. "What did he look like?"

"Glamorous," Teru said. "Like he was a fashion model or a famous actor."

"Geni was a meteor," Sephiroth said.

The days past. Sephiroth talked about Midgar's war with Wu-Tai, and Genesis' materia-less power; he spoke of the downfall of the Wu-Tai people, of Genesis' terrible guilt; of the goddess, Loveless, and of a life that burned brighter than any other in Midgar for a few short years.

"His goddess gave him the choice," Sephiroth said at nightfall on the seventh day of their journey. "To achieve a greatness, and a glory, beyond any other mortal but to perish quickly in the flames, or to live a long, ordinary life. He chose glory; he chose light." He lowered his gaze, watching the rain on the grass. He did not speak again for a while.


	41. Light

**Disclaimer: I own nothing. Death Note and Final Fantasy are the property of their respective owners.**

**A/N: One day, with the gods as my witnesses, I will get a review!**

Sephiroth fell into silence.

It was Teru's turn to speak. He told him about Light and the death note. Half-convinced that it was a dream, but certain that without the dream his life lost its anchor, he told Sephiroth about Kira and the power of the notebook. Sephiroth listened with quiet absorption, once in a while questioning Teru about.

"I have never heard of such an artifact as a death note," Sephiroth said. "But I seem to recall that Kira is an old Wu-Taian deity; his temples have been dark for many centuries."

"Is that so?"

"It is," Sephiroth said. Then, "Why did you embark on such a quest, to rid the world of all criminals?" Teru's answer was swift, and firm,

"Justice," he said.

"Justice," Sephiroth echoed.

"There was no justice in the world," Teru said. "Everyday, we were descending further and further into the absolute anarchy of human depravity. I saw it; he saw it too." Teru's mouth hardened and his eyes flashed. "Everyday I asked myself: 'why do the innocent have to die?' I could not give myself any answer. There was no good reason that good people, innocent people suffered and perished, why these flames went out so quickly. What need was there for a six-year-old in Osaka to be beaten to death by her uncle? What part of the great cosmic order was satisfied by the beating death of an eighty-year-old man trying to defend his wife from a rape by two young men? Why were so many innocent sacrifices demanded and what kind of world did we live in that demanded such things? I kept on asking myself, why did they innocent have to die?"

"I see," Sephiroth said. "And Light Yagami gave you the answer. He said, 'They do not.'"

"Yes," Teru exuded the joy of that moment, when that answer had first come into his life. "Light was the one who looked ahead, and saw a world where death only came to the guilty, where the innocent were shielded from it as long as they could be, until it was natural, and without hate, because no natural death bears a person away in hate, or fear."

"I begin to understand you better," Sephiroth said.

They fell into silence, listening to the rain on the water. From there, the days of their journey passed by untroubled until the night of the ambush.


	42. The Marauder's Ambush

**Disclaimer: I own nothing. Death Note and Final Fantasy are the property of their respective owners.**

**A/N: One day, with the gods as my witnesses, I will get a review!**

The fall of Wu-Tai had left the nation in ruins. Farmlands had been burned bare. The young males of fighting age lay dead. Families had no men who could work to support them. Jobs were scarce and almost impossible to find. Competition for them was desperate; many people went hungry.

And there are those who need nothing more than the desperation and misery of ordinary people to become criminals. The downtrodden are easy victims; easily robbed; easily disposed of.

In Wu-Tai, bands of robbers marauded along the roads where the refugees traveled. They descended from the low-lying slopes and the shallow ridges. They killed men, took women, abandoned or killed children out of hand. They plundered what the people carried; the women they sold to brothels or labor houses in the pits of Midgar's lower-plate slums.

On the eighth morning since Sephiroth and Teru rejoined the band, a horde of marauders descended from the cliffs in a violent cyclone of shouting and bellowing, riding chocobos, and mounted on all-terrain mud-sliders.

The night they came, Teru and Sephiroth had, by coincidence, remained awake, sitting away from the rest of the company by the river. They were taken violently from their thoughts by the terrible noise, and the screams of people awakening as the marauders rushed down on them.

"Come with me," Sephiroth said. He grabbed a thick, sturdy piece of river driftwood, the right size for a bow staff, and he and Teru ran in the direction of the shouting. On the brink of the trees, Sephiroth stopped. He reached into the linen pouch, where he kept his materia.

"Take this," he lay a dark jewel in his hand.

"What is this?" Teru asked.

"Death materia," Sephiroth said. "You used this thing you call a death note; you will almost certainly have an aptitude for death materia."

"This is—?"

"All you have to do is charge it," Sephiroth said. "Hold it in your hand, and charge it with the desire that the one you are fighting or facing must die, and it will kill them." Sephiroth withdrew a long sword, and darted out of the trees.

In the next second, Teru lost sight of him. Teru charged out, blindly, searching for the bandits, but the forest was a confusion of screams. Firagas blazed out of the trees, striking the men of the group who burst and burned to ash before him.

"No!" Teru shouted. More screams tore the air. People ran through the trees, women clutching babies and dragging children by the hand. He could see nothing but the terror and confusion of the ambush.

Then the first of the marauder's materialized from the shadow and smoke, face illuminated by the firaga spell he held in his hand. His eyes met Teru's; he drew his spell back, prepared to fire.

He fell from his mud-slider, dead.

Then Teru knew what he must do.


	43. Murder Among the Refugees

**Disclaimer: I own nothing. Death Note and Final Fantasy are property of their respective owners.**

**A/N: C'mon, review it already!**

The firaga spells the bandits used were like beacons to the two powerful men who followed and killed the marauders, Sephiroth with the calm poise of an angel, a scourge, a seraphim killing without the agitation or fear attendant on mortals, who must always doubt their own righteousness (in this he reminded Teru very much of Light Yagami); and Teru, outraged and shouting at them to abandon their fight, furious at their brutality, slaying them with nothing but the thought that the unjust should perish.

In the end, there was little left of the marauders but corpses.

Sephiroth, still pristine and spotlessly clean, despite his physical exertion, finished the last one by the riverside as he attempted to flee. With only a slight smile—he was pleased that he was still so fit—he slew him in the shallow water, letting the current carry him away. Cleaning off his sword in the water, he sheathed it in materia casing, and went through the trees to find Teru.

The band of refugees were slowly emerging from the forest, wandering in a daze through the burning wreckage of the corpses. Sephiroth tucked his hair back in the linen parka, and went through the shocked crowds shouting for loved ones, overturning bodies in hopes of finding their families yet alive.

In an anxious knot of people, he found Teru Mikami. They had begun gathering up the injured and laying them on the driest, most comfortable bedding available. People were gathering from all parts of the encampment, shouting, sobbing over their dying friends and family.

Teru sat beside a small figure. The tiny thing's face was covered in blood, and in her hair, two bloody strips of pink fabric.

"Mikami-san," Sephiroth said. "Mikami-san, leave her alone. If you want her to survive you must not touch here, you must not be near her." Teru turned to him, dark eyes stern and angry.

"Why would you say such a thing to me? Do you think I would hurt her? I would never harm the innocent!"

"You may not mean to," Sephiroth said. "In fact, I am sure you won't intentionally, but—"

"Then take it," Teru threw the black materia at him. "Take it, so I won't hurt her, even by accident." He bent over her, wiping the blood from her eyes. "Come on, Kanako-chan," he said softly. She looked at him, stunned eyes finding his, and focusing on him with faint recognition. Her limp arms moved; she tried to get up. He, "Shhh, stay lying down, Kanko-chan."

"Mikami-san," Sephiroth said. "Come away from her."

"My ototosan, does he want to see me?" she asked. Teru stopped, his hand poised above the blood-smeared face.

"Your ototosan has gone away," Teru said.

"Mikami-san, come away from her if you don't want her to die—"

"I will not hurt her," Teru snapped. "I gave you back the materia."

"It isn't materia, Mikami-san," Sephiroth said.

"What?"

"It isn't materis. It is a pebble, one I took from the pond. It had no power; the power is only yours."

Teru's face drained of all anger. For a moment, he said nothing, his mouth open in dumb shock. Then,

"I don't have the notebook. It can't be possible, Crescentu-san. I can't kill, death isn't mine to wield, it comes from—"

"From you," Sephiroth said softly. "I knew it the moment I met you. She knew it too."

Teru's eyes came to rest on the child, dead in his arms.


	44. Music

**Disclaimer: I own nothing. Death Note and Final Fantasy are property of their respective owners.**

**A/N: C'mon, review it already!**

The palatial ship charged across the barren, empty wastes of the northern sea in the golden heat of luxury. Light's suite, a grand design of wood paneled walls and Wu-Taian carpeting was fully warmed when he and Yazoo arrived. The fireplaces had been lit and stoked by the cabin stewards, the silk cushions and throws piled invitingly on the bed, the tables set with cognac for Light and champagne for Yazoo, the light of the lamps dimmed.

It was a scene prepared for seduction. This was Light's intention: that the scene should be perfect for an affair.

This was because he had no intention of seducing Yazoo. He wanted to understand him, if possible to help him, and he wanted the purity of his intentions to contrast sharply with the room and with Yazoo's own expectations.

They ordered and dined in, on the floor in front of the fireplace. Yazoo's silver hair, heavy, water-like formed cascades along his bared shoulders and throat. He watched Light across the table; in his smile, vultures pried at human flesh.

Oh Light, why were you not afraid?

"How long have you been engaged?" Light asked.

"Almost a year now," Yazoo said. He brushed his hair aside. "I know, the age difference. It can strike people as jarring, but my fiancé—Ferdinand—we are unexpectedly compatible."

"Unexpected to you or him?" Light asked, leaning into his hand. He did a quick calculation, placed the date of Yazoo's engagement sometime around the time he had been returned after the war of the children.

"To both of us," Yazoo said.

"May-December romances are some of the most passionate," Light said. "How did you meet?" Yazoo's eyes, the green witchlights, flickered.

"I've known him since I was young," he said. "He was my teacher, for a while. I'm certainly not the first young man to fall for his professor."

"Then you cannot be very old," Light said.

"Seventeen."

"Twenty-one," Light said. "And still single."

"People marry young in Midgar," Yazoo said.

"I have my work to occupy me," Light said.

"You're a Net-Tech."

"For money, yes," Light said. "But that isn't what really excites me. I love computers, but it doesn't set my heart going the way reforms do."

"Reforms?"

"Yes," Light said. "I'm active in the reform movements in Midgar, especially criminal reform."

"I didn't think anyone was trying to reform Midgar," Yazoo said. "I though abandoning it for Edge City sort of summed up everyone's attitude towards it."

"For a while, maybe," Light said. "But leaving Midgar was like trying to walk away from our past. It isn't the simple. The city has to be put right; the bodies have to be buried; the ghosts have to be satisfied." He downed a shot of cognac, golden as his eyes, and said, "Two years ago, the attack on Edge City that drove the population back to Midgar occurred. To this day, the people call it the War of the Ghosts." His eyes came to rest on Yazoo. "The War of the Ghosts. The attack was Midgar's past, returning to have its hour; our history refused to be forgotten, it forbade us from starting fresh, with reckoning the accounts of the past." The amber lanterns of the living room forming a halo around his hair as he spoke.

"It's a wonder a mind like yours survives in Midgar," Yazoo yawned. "It seems like someone more interested in super-imposing metaphysical dramas on reality would be killed off immediately. Failing to take a fight literally usually spells death."

"It would be naïve to think that a literal fight is over when the bullets stop flying and the materia stones go dark," Light smiled. "More naïve to think that literal fights do not spell out the psychological forces that propel them forward."

"I said metaphysical, not psychological."

"Are they very different?"

"Yes."

"I hadn't noticed," Light said. He grinned, "So tell me, when Lady Macbeth lurches across the stage singing 'Una macchia è qui tuttora!' do you sit in the audience thinking she's just having a problem doing her laundry?"

"Verdi," Yazoo said, and then, "An opera is a far cry from a real battle."

"Conflict," Light said, "is often seen in art before it is seen in reality."

"You're a dream," Yazoo said.

"I take that as a compliment."

"You're going to get killed in Midgar," Yazoo said.

"Will you come to my funeral?"

"Fra poco a tu ricovero darà negletto avello," Yazoo said. "Una pietosa lagrima  
non scenderà su quello!1" Light threw his head back, laughing. Yazoo's mouth softened into a smile.

"It's time for real music," Light said. He got up from the carpet, his black tuxedo attractively wrinkled, and went to his computer set up discretely on one of the end tables. "Your choice. Which opera do you want to listen to?"

"Pique-dame," Yazoo said.

"Tchaikovsky," Light said. "You don't play around do you?"

"You don't like it?"

"I'm just glad you didn't go straight for the Ring Cycle," Light said.

"Gods, no, not right after dinner," Yazoo said. After a moment, he said, "What do you want to listen to?"

"I have some music of my own you might like," Light said. "Non-opera."

"Like what?"

"You won't have heard of it," Light said. "It's not from here."

"Where is it from?" Yazoo asked, but the warm violins had already climbed high into the glittering atmosphere.

Soon an uncared-for tomb shall give you refuge. No tear of pity will be shed upon it!

1


	45. What You Are

**Disclaimer: I own nothing. Death Note and Final Fantasy are property of their respective owners.**

**A/N: C'mon, review it already!**

"She doesn't look like me!" Yaya rolled over on the rug, a glass of champagne in his hand. Light lay on his stomach beside him, maneuvering through the files on his computer.

"Yes she does," Light said. "Lady Gaga looks like you."

"My nose is different."

"That's one difference, and not even that big of one."

"Her nose is completely flat, mine isn't."

"You're going to have to let this nose thing go," he said, bring up stills of a few music videos. "See, look. She looks like you."

"You're a liar."

"No, I'm not," Light said. He lay on his back, letting another playlist play. Yazoo held himself up on his elbows, sipping from the crystal flute.

They were both semi-drunk, lying on the carpet in a comfortable, semi-flirtatious haze, one that Light was careful to keep from erupting into anything more serious. The music—a mixture of rock and roll, Japanese pop, and discotheque dance music—was what Light had brought with him in his ipod and in his smartphone. Yazoo watched over Light's shoulder as he went from folder to folder through the data he'd had in his electronics when he found himself in Midgar. Among them were some photographs of Light and his family, and of Tokyo.

"You really aren't from here, are you?" Yaya said. "Where…where is that?" Yaya pointed at one of the photographs.

"That was taken in the city, in Tokyo."

"Its so bright," he said. "The lights of the city are beautiful."

"Tokyo is a beautiful city," Light said. "It was…" he turned to Yaya. "These photos are the only things that keep me from thinking I invented the whole thing."

Over the course of the evening, Light had made the calculated decision to tell Yazoo about his mysterious emergence into Midgar.

He recounted the story with as much detail as he could remember. He had slept that morning alone, in the hotel room that he shared with L. He had collapsed, exhausted, on the couch and had planned to sleep for three hours, because he never slept for longer than that when L was not with him. He had awakened in a hotel room, in Midgar. He felt normal, even refreshed, until he walked outside.

"The first thing I noticed was the smell," Light said. "Midgar smells different than Tokyo does. Burning rubber was the closest thing I could compare it to. I thought there must be tires burning close by the building, but the smell was more ubiquitous."

"If that had happened to me, the first thing I would have done would be to look for my brothers," Yaya said.

"Brothers?" Light asked. "How many?"

"Two," Yazoo said. "Kada and Lo." His head had fallen to the side, silent, considering. "We've always gone everywhere together. It would never even occur to me that I could be somewhere without them. It would be like suddenly appearing somewhere without my hands or my feet."

"You're very close?" Light had asked.

"Very," Yaya said. "Kadi and Lo are everything to me." He smiled, softly, "Kadi is kind of my baby. He's very smart and very precocious, and he always expects to get his way in everything, which is partly my fault because I like to give him his way."

"How old is he?"

"Almost sixteen," Yazoo said. "He's in training right now, to be a computer engineer. You and he will probably have a lot in common, especially if you like video games."

"Not really," Light said. "I've played a couple. I never got into RPGs. Too time consuming."

"I don't even know what those are," Yazoo said. "I'm sure Kadi does."

As the evening progressed, the discussion had wended its way through everyone that Yazoo knew. He talked in short, controlled bursts and Light knew that despite drinking, Yazoo was being selective with the details he was sharing: he said nothing too personal, nothing that Light could use to track him, or to pry too menacingly into his life. He talked about his brothers—both immensely talented and destined for greatness, in his estimation—about opera, and about Midgar. He held the city in very low esteem; especially despised, in his opinion, were the Turks.

"The worst part about them isn't what they _do._ I mean, it is. They're bullies, the Turks. They're masters of the thinly veiled threat, especially their leader. They are corrupt, Light. They further Shinra's aims, not the good of the people. You like social reform, don't you? The Turk's must be public enemy number one, in your book."

"I'm aware of them," Light said. "And of what their policies are, and what they have been."

"The Turks are the worst," Yazoo said. "I would never feel safe living in Midgar, knowing that people like that were carrying guns."

"What about you?"

"Hm?" Yazoo looked up, startled. "What do you mean, what about me?"

"You've told me about your brothers—Kadi the genius, Lo the sportsman—and about the Turks, and how much you hate them. What about you?"

"What about me?"

"What do you do?" Light lay on his side, facing Yazoo. "What do you want? What are you good at?"

"Those are such broad questions," Yazoo said.

"What do you want to do when we arrive in Midgar?"

"I'm not stopping in Midgar," Yazoo said. "We're going on to Kalm, then to Archades."

"In Archades, then. What are you going to do once you arrive in Archades?" Yazoo's smile faded.

"I'm going to get married."

"Then? What are you going to do the next day?" Yazoo rolled his hair behind his ear.

"I don't know," he said. He looked up at Light, and said. "I don't _do_ anything, Light. I'm not a stock character who has to have a thing. I'm not the 'brains' or the 'brawn,' or the 'healer,' or the 'mage.' I think that whole way of defining oneself is stupid. I am Yazoo. I'm getting married. Maybe the next day, I'll get up and read a book. Maybe I won't. Maybe I'll buy furniture for our house, or help my genius brother hook up a computer, or time my sporting brother while he runs a mile. But I won't _do_ anything, because I don't have anything I do that makes me who I am. I'm Yazoo. I guess I'll just do that." Light smiled.

"I like that answer," he said.

That night, he dove into the net and read every document he could find about Hojo, Lucrezia, and Sephiroth. He read their transcripts from schools, employee evaluations, reports, even yearbooks. He watched as many tapes as remained of Lucrezia and Hojo at work in Deepground, fashioning Sephiroth in the womb and later in the glass womb of the lab, incubating in his blue Jenova baths.

Throughout the evening, Yazoo's answer played across his mind. It irritated him that Yazoo would give an answer like that, but the reason for his irritation was ghostly and elusive. With half his mind trained on the tapes, he teased-out the reasons. It was glib, for one thing. It deliberately failed to understand the spirit of the question, and avoided it completely. Yet, on further reflection, it became clear that each reason was inadequate. In fact, it was a perfectly justified response. _Why does it bother me then?_

It was only by late the next morning, just before he fell asleep, that he understood why.

_Because I know who you are._

Then he fell asleep, and that last thought faded into silence.


	46. The Darkwar Saga

**Disclaimer: I own nothing. Death Note and Final Fantasy are property of their respective owners.**

**A/N: C'mon, review it already!**

L sat on the sofa, watching the cut scene come to a close. Light and Yazoo lay in the bed until early morning when Yazoo, smiling, sphinx-eyed, left his suite.

The wild hypothesizing among the detectives had given way to confusion when, just like Light Yagami, Teru Mikami proved to have vanished from Tokyo, from the earth itself. For most of the afternoon they sat, watching Matt play through the game, waiting for the next scene, the next twist of the plot, the next hint as to where they had gone.

It disappointed L because, while it was one of the more interesting developments in a case replete with twists—a case that would become much stranger as the months wore on—L knew that all the elements for a full understanding were there and that his subordinates had simply become too griped by the fantasy, by the very idea that a place like Midgar could exist as a place governed by its own internal laws, and that it could be reached by human, albeit an extraordinary, boy.

They had become completely engrossed in the entrance of Light into another world, and on uncovering the mysteries of that world. They looked only at the motion forward, the journey into the unknown. They failed almost completely to consider the opposite direction; they failed to understand that Light to have passed from world to the other, a channel had to be open, perhaps one navigable in both directions.

Dr. Hojo. The clue lay with Dr. Hojo.

L scrolled through the cut scene gallery and replayed the cutscene in the laboratory.

"_What is he?"_

"_He is…a very powerful vortex of dark energy, for lack of a better term," Hojo said, rounding the side of the tank, his gaze fixed on the man's face. Yazoo touched the tank. A spark snapped at his fingers. "Yes, be careful. There is an immense, terrible power concentrated in this entity."_

"_You didn't make him then?"_

_(Laughter)_

"_Not anymore than I made Jenova, no, Faremis, no I didn't cook him up in a cauldron. I found him. Just like you found—though I correctly identified—Jenova. And anyway, he is nothing like Jenova. Jenova was an alien life form. This thing you see here—my discovery—is more along the lines of Chaos or Omega, only multiplied exponentially. This is a being of the pure, condensed, energy of destruction."_

L considered this carefully for a moment, then turned to Stephan Gevanni's report. Stephen had been in charge of tailing Mikami; it had been Stephen who had first reported the infatuation that seemed to be occurring between Mikami and Namikawa, who alone of the Yotsuba group had inexplicably been spared the terrible wrath of Kira.

The last time Stephen had seen him he had gone to the hospital, to attend to his wrist, which he had broken during a kendo routine.

The answer would, of course, be there.

L's mind was no less than brilliant than Light's. At times, and to the untrained, Light at times appeared smarter, but this was entirely due to a confusion between a broad, expansive intelligence and a narrowing, analytical intelligence. Light was the latter, L was the former.

If Light could see ahead in the chess game, L was the board on which they played, the room in which they sat, the air they breathed, the gathered total of their lives.

Hence L, even as he made plans to go to the hospital and search out the way that Dr. Hojo (doctor, of course, didn't it make sense that he would blend in at a hospital, that he'd kidnap Mikami from there?), even as he began getting together a forensic team, his mind was beginning to put together a hypothesis of what had happened.

_This did not begin with Light. It began with Dr. Hojo. How do you surpass an undefeatable weapon like Sephiroth? Sephiroth wields the cosmos itself as a weapon. What could be more destructive than that? Only one thing: pure destruction itself._

_But what is pure destruction? Each thing can destroy something else. But what destroys all things? What, though is pure destruction? The antithesis of creation, and life._

_Yes, Dr. Hojo began seeking a way to harness the power of __destruction itself._

_If Teru Mikami really is what Sephiroth Crescent says he is, then Hojo must have found him. He searched for Teru, and found him here._

_I would be willing to bet anything that he got Light first._

_Yes of course. Both Light and Teru have used that death note. Both of them have lived with that 'esper' (shinigami? Yes, probably) and both of them have caused so much death, they both must have looked like possible targets. Perhaps Light, because he is so smart, registered with more force on Hojo's radars. But as soon as he brought Light over, he would have realized Light was not who he was looking for._

_Too much trouble to send him back? Maybe._

_He went after Mikami next, and brought him over. Poor Mikami-san! _

This, of course, meant several things. The first was that Hojo had found a way to enter their world. The second was that this breach between worlds would have originated in Hojo's world.

L did a quick search (via smartphone) for other final fantasy games which featured attempts to move between worlds. He found Final Fantasy VI, where Emperor Gestahl and Kefka Palazzo attempted to open a portal between the world of the espers and the world of Ivalice. He bought a copy of the newest version, _Final Fantasy VI-II: The Darkwar_. Matt would have to play this game as well

Yet the search at the hospital turned out to be frustratingly unproductive. L, using a sophisticated arsenal of technology borrowed from the astrophysics and cosmology department of To-oh university, located the remains of an enormous energy fluctuation (the findings would later be published and would make world headlines) but it was only a residue of something that, by all calculations, had at one time been much larger and much more powerful. L, an excellent mathematician in his own right, calculated its power had once been several times that of a black hole, and felt it was safe to conclude that it was from this point that Mikami had been taken.

By the time he arrived home from the hospital, he was certain that Dr. Hojo had found a way of punching holes between dimensions and that this was the cause of the two disappearances. The portals, however, originated in Hojo's world, and it was to Hojo's world of Ivalice that L would have to look.

"Hi Matt," he said when he came in. "Here, play this too please." Matt blinked, red-eyed at him.

"Huh?"

"Play this too please?"

"Oh, sure L," Matt said. "Why?"

"I think it may be very important for the investigation."

While Matt fire up the game, L sat down to crunch numbers and calculate, using the known energy gradients and the rate of the energy decay, to calculate the vector and distance (mathematically, since they were far beyond naïve notions of 'space' at this point) of Hojo's location.

In the first cut-scene of the game, Kefka Palazzo paraded across the screen.


	47. Reiji Namikawa

**Disclaimer: I own nothing. Death Note and Final Fantasy are property of their respective owners.**

**A/N: C'mon, review it already!**

**Son of A/N: This is one of my favorite chapters! **

Reiji Namikawa woke up with a headache.

_Sh*t_.

He sat up, rubbing his temples. His long black hair fell between his shoulder blades. Reiji had always kept his hair tied back, ensuring that it was one of his most erotic features. But this afternoon, it felt heavy on his head.

_Sh*t._

He got up. His body heaved forward, and he had to grab the thick trunk of the bedpost with one hand, bracing his other hand on the heavy crystal ball on the nightstand.

_The f*ck?_

Reiji braced himself, and tried to focus on exactly what he was looking at. He was fairly certain her didn't own any crystal balls, at least not any this big and garish. It was a blue color, with swirls of purple, like something a nostalgic flower-child had bought in a second-hand head shop. It was tacky, not something Reiji would have spent money on.

_Who the f*ck is that clown?_

Now he knew something was wrong. A man was standing in the room, long blond hair pulled tight, face painted white with red harlequin-type designs around his eyes, framed by the decorative lintels at the entrance way of his bedroom.

_A_ bedroom. It was now clear that the room, tacky crystal balls, clowns and all, wasn't his.

"Did you enjoy your rest?" the clown asked sleekly, a big ruff of red and gold, like an inner tube ring bobbing around his neck as he moved.

"Who are you?" Reiji asked. The man extended one foot with a long, pointed cloth shoe, opened his arms, and bowed.

"Kefka Palazzo, advisor to his royal Majesty Emperor Gestahl, at your service," he said. His icy blue eyes contrasted sharply with his enormous, painted red lips.

"Emperor who?"

"His Majesty Emperor Gestahl, of the top half of Ivalice."

"The top half?"

"Yes. Emperor Solidor owns the bottom half."

"Of…"

"Ivalice."

"You're going to have to repeat this, because I've never heard of any of these places or these people," Reiji said. He looked down at his clothes, and found that his business suit had been replaced with a long blue robe over a sleek, silver tunic. A belt of beaten silver glinted around his waist and long, flowing white trains of fabric rustled and hissed when he moved. "Oh my God, I look like an extra out of _Lord of the Rings_!" Reiji said. "What in the hell is going on here? What the—who the hell are you and what the hell am I doing here?"

Kefka's mouth twitched.

"Who am I? I am the Mad Master of Magitek," he said.

"Fine, great, Mad Master, whatever. What. The. Hell. Am. I. Doing. Here?" Reiji said deliberately, hands on his hips.

Behind them two soldiers appeared, carrying spade-headed lances fitted with crystals. A man wearing vividly ornamented red and gold brocade and a gold and obsidian crown appeared. He had long, white-blond hair and deep, grey eyes. He was young for an emperor, perhaps nearing thirty-five, with the broad shoulders and the blunt, forward gaze of a man who had once been military officer.

When he met Reiji's black, upswept eyes he dropped his gaze, lifted it again. He turned to Kefka and nodded his head. Kefka withdrew back into the doorway, with the guards.

"Good evening," the man said. "I am Gestahl. Are you…have my advisors made you comfortable?"

"I have a headache," Reiji said. The robe was too large for him, and slid down his shoulders. The silk tantalized porcelain white skin, sculpted by his avid swordsmanship. His black hair wrapped silky tendrils around a pillared throat, dipping seductively into the fabric, touching the flesh beneath. The image was magnified in Gestahl's eyes. He came forward.

"I'm sorry. Would you like to lie down again?"

"No thank you," Reiji said. "Oh, my God, what is going on here? The Mad Master of whatever hasn't exactly been, you know, helpful."

"I answered all your questions!" Kefka snapped from his place by the door.

"I asked him to refrain from a full explanation, until I had a chance to speak to you," Gestahl said. "Would you…" he made a timid, half-hearted gesture towards the balcony, "would you like to…?"

"Balcony? Sure, fine, just someone needs to explain this to me," he grabbed handfuls of his silks and went to the panorama windows that opened out onto the balcony.

Reiji emerged into the sunlight, in a landscape of steam and blue sky. Clouds like mountains floated past them on currents of air, whipped by the winds of the upper atmosphere. Reiji's mouth opened.

"Where are we?"

"This, this is my kingdom. Upper Ivalice, the floating continent. This is the capitol, Vector."

"We're floating?"

"Yes," Gestahl said. He came forward, taking one of Reiji's thin hands in his. "Flower of Japan, I beg you to hear me out."

This time Reiji said nothing, just stared, open mouthed as the Emperor bent to kiss his hand. The silk robe chose this moment to fall off his shoulders completely. He caught it, holding it shut over his chest. The wind sailed past, lifting the silks, like the airy feathers of a crane. The Emperor was a good five centimeters taller than Reiji, but he bent his gaze down when he spoke.

"I was born a peasant, a man of humble origins. I have become emperor through my own blood. All my life I have sought to uncover the secrets of the magic that infuses our world with the mystery and power of the elements. I have dedicated myself to understanding sorcery and grammerye, but I have never, nor do I think I will ever, encounter a magic like you.

"I first saw you only a year ago—only for a few minutes, when the Eyes of the Gateway opened on your world—but I have never been able to forget you. We were born in different worlds. Maybe I should never have tried to cross the boundaries between worlds, maybe I never should have opened that gateway—then I would be at peace. But I would have never seen you. I would have never known this feeling.

"I am in love with you. Boldly do I declare it, I am in love with you. I declare it to all the world, to the floating continent itself, to every esper, I love you, Lotus of Tokyo Village.

"Boldly I declare it, but not rashly. I have had many months to ponder these feelings, and they have not waned. They are as strong now as they were at the first moment I laid eyes on you. I have lain sleepless nights thinking about you, and no concubine in all of Ivalice can satisfy my sleeplessness. I am bold, but not reckless or over-hasty. I know what I feel, there is no mistaking that.

"Cherry blossom of the Island Nation, you have never seen me before, but I've seen you. I have exhausted myself in every magical right, every form of prayer, to try and bring you here, but my efforts have been in vain and the Gods do not answer me, and so I hope you will forgive me for taking these matters into my own hands and bringing you here to me. I expect that you will be—"

"Wait, wait, wait," at this point, Reiji Namikawa interrupted the Emperor. "Back up for one second, what do you mean you brought me here? Where is here?"

"Ivalice, the—"

"No, no, I got that part," Reiji said. "I mean in relation to Japan. Where is Ivalice in relation to Japan? Are we in Eastern Europe somewhere?"

"Blossom of the Pacific," Gestahl said, eyes trembling with the sight before him. "It's a little more complicated than that."

"How much more complicated? Can you give me the thirty-second version?"

"Our worlds are separated by the Walls of Creation."

"Oh my god."

"These," Gestahl said, "these are the bulwarks that separate the different worlds that all lie parallel to one another within the great Nexus of the Real."

"Oh my god," Reiji sat down heavily on the ornamented balustrade, the king kneeling beside him, still holding his hand.

"Our worlds developed on two different paths," the king said. "We have a different time, a different history, and a different order." He paused a moment, then, "Perhaps I should never have let my eyes look past the Walls, for nothing seems as real to me anymore as your beauty, Orchid of the Kanto Region."

"Would you stop with the flowers, already?"

"I don't know what else to call you."

"You don't know my name?"

"No."

"Reiji Namikawa," Reiji said. "You can call me Namikawa." The Emperor's face hardened.

"May I," he said, "after all my efforts, my I not at least call you Reiji?"

"Oh, right, you're western, fine, call me Reiji," he said.

"In my head, I always called you—"

"If it's a flower, forget it."

"—Sakura."

"I knew it."

"I know this must be jarring—"

"Jarring? Jarring doesn't even begin to cover it, Gestahlu-san," Reiji said. "How could you—how do I get back?"

"It was," The emperor began, "a very difficult thing, to bring you here—"

"Never mind that, how do I get back?" The emperor cleared his throat.

"That," he said, "is a little more difficult."

"Oh my god."

"I urge you to consider—"

"You kidnapped me from my own world, and you don't know how to get me back?"

"—that I—"

"I'm not considering anything until you tell me how the hell I'm supposed to get back! I have a life in Tokyo, Gestahlu-san. I have family, friends, I have a goddamn fiancée!"

"A fiancée?" Gestahl face flushed red. "What is his name?"

"Mido," Reiji said, aware that the Emperor had gone from meek to angry in the space of a second, and at the mere mention of Shingo's name. He glared coldly down at Reiji.

"And," he said, "do you love him?"

"Why?" Reiji asked.

The emperor reached out and grabbed Reiji's forearms, crushing them in his enormous hands. Reiji let out a little yelp of surprise. Gestahl jerked him close.

"I could not bare it," he rasped, bring his face close to Reiji. "I have been so tortured over you, in such an agony of love, I could not bare it if you loved another." Reiji's eyes widened.

"Take it easy," Reiji said. "We're friends. That's about it." Seeing the emperor's face, Reiji quickly shut up any mention of Teru Mikami. The emperor let him go, sinking as if in terrible exhaustion.

_Teru_. For the first time, a wave of real desperation to return home welled up in Reiji's heart. Kefka appeared just inside the room, watching through the balcony doors.

"I could not bare it," the emperor said. "I could not bare it if you loved another." He looked up, his expression one of fitful, desperate adoration once more. "Flower—ah, Reiji," Gestahl said. "If you did not love him—and you don't know how relieved I am to hear it—then I urge you to consider my offer."


	48. Kefka Palazzo

**Disclaimer: I own nothing. Death Note and Final Fantasy are property of their respective owners.**

**A/N: C'mon, review it already!**

**Son of A/N: This is one of my favorite chapters! **

**Son of the son of A/N: It's long but worth it! Love you Kefka! **

A warm, swunswept pause.

"Oh…kay, what's your offer?" Reiji asked.

Perhaps, in that few seconds of silence, it occurred to Reiji that he was actually alone, in a foreign land, with no possibility of getting back except through the man before him, the man alternately professing his love and displaying outrage at the thought of losing Reiji to anyone else.

"That you become my concubine."

"What?"

"I would not marry you," he said. "I would not dream of it. Then, too often, we would be separate, our relationship one of mutual duty to our nation. But as my concubine, you will have all the privileges of a prince and will go everywhere with me. You will have everything you desire."

"Are you crazy?"

"Yes," Gestahl said. He leapt to his feet once more, grabbing Reiji. "Yes, I am crazy. I am insane with love. I would rather us both be flung from the parapets of the palace than live without you. Please, I understand that this is sudden, I even understand if you are angry, but in time—years perhaps, but I am patient—in time you will come to see that it is a great arrangement—"

"Okay, fine," Reiji said. "I'll do it."

Both Gestahl, and behind him Kefka, stared at Reiji with open disbelief. After a few more noisy, windy seconds of speechless amazement, the king said.

"You…will?"

"Yeah, sure," Reiji's voice trembled slightly, but he laughed over it. "What the hell, right? Sure, I'll do it."

"Really?" Kefka piped up behind the king. Gestahl turned triumphantly to Kefka.

"I told you, didn't I? I told you, I told you I couldn't feel this way in vain."

"You did," Kefka said dryly. "Several times." He looked at Reiji, "A proper young prince, when thus kidnapped, would require at least a few years of ardent wooing."

"So I'm not a proper young prince," Reiji said. His face was pale, his fingers gripping the cloth around is chest. "So sue me. I'll do it."

The emperor's expression was one of pure, ecstatic joy.

"Blessed day!" he said. "I will always remember this moment, Tiger Lily of the South Seas."

"Please stop with the flowers."

"Ah—sorry."

"It's fine," Reiji said. The emperor had moved in closer, cornering Reiji between the balustrade—and a long drop into the courtyard below—and his impressive bulk. His shadow fell over Reiji. He pulled his closer, bending towards him. He said in a warm, urgent whisper,

"My beloved, you will stay in chambers very close to mine—"

"Yeah, we'll fight about that later."

"—but I will respect any boundary that you set."

"Oh. Well, thank you. Do you mind?" Reiji moved to free himself, and Gestahl let him go.

"Of course," he murmured. "Yes, of course, I will leave you alone. To rest. But tonight we will have a great celebration, in your honor."

"That's not necessary."

"Of course it is," Gestahl said. "A feast, in your honor."

"Thanks, I guess."

"Of course," Gestahl bowed, kissing his hand. "I will see you tonight, Tiger Lily."

"You know where to find me," Reiji said. The king bowed again, smiling uncontrollably, and left the room.

Kefka Palazzo, impatiently tapping one floppy shoe, remained behind.

"That was unexpected," he said.

"What? Being kidnapped and forced to become a concubine?"

"No, not that," Kefka said. "That happens surprisingly often in Ivalice, and in Midgar. I can't even begin to tell you about all the bride-nappings among the Ishbalans. No, I'd venture to say _that's_ quite normal. I just thought you'd put up a little more resistance than that," Kefka said, examining his glassy, brightly painted nails. "But then, I suppose not. You are from a very different kind of place."

"Listen Kefka," Reiji said. "How long has he been watching me?"

"A year, whenever he could," Kefka said. "You're not going to be rid of him easily now. He's quite infatuated. I told him there were plenty of displaced wu-taian hard luck cases among the refugees who would have loved to be concubines, but he'd have none of it. It had to be you, despite the complications of inter-worldly travel."

"You know about all this, Walls of Creation, Nexus of the Real stuff?"

"I'd venture to say I know a great deal more than anyone else," Kefka said. "With the exception of one shrimpy little alchemist over in Central, but who's really keeping track?"

"How can I get back to my world?" Reiji asked. Kefka grinned, his lips curling.

"My world, your world," he said. "Those distinctions don't matter in the slightest, if you know anything about time."

"What are you talking about?"

Just then, the doors opened and a group of servants carrying great piles of clothing bustled into the room.

"I'll leave you to your new possessions," Kefka said, strolling out of the room. "Goodnight to you."

He disappeared out into the marble hall.


End file.
